


You and Me (or, How We Didn't Kill Each Other)

by Nvos



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Adventure, Enemies to Lovers, Genderfluid Character, Other, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-08-05 16:17:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 50,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16370936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nvos/pseuds/Nvos
Summary: And not for a lack of trying. Stephen Strange, soon after returning to his title of Sorcerer Supreme and mandated defender of the Earth from everything magical, is brought in to a round table in Avenger's Tower discussing one thing: the fact that he's now responsible for the God of Mischief, Loki, for the foreseeable future, with nothing in the damned world he can do about it.An adventure awaits. (And many, many bottles of spiced bourbon.)





	1. Unheroic

**Author's Note:**

> Although the universe is 616 and makes heavy reference to events that have happened in the comics, a knowledge of comics this fic does not require! Time is after Avengers (2018), before whatever the hell is going on in Infinity Wars.

Here is Avenger’s Tower, baked in the icy slope of a mountain and a dead Celestial.

Normally, when everyone’s faces at the round table are varied shades of though the world might be ending, the topic discussed had something to do with a certain golden gauntlet socketed with certain multicolored gems.

Right now, though, particularly for one Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme? All it had taken was a single sentence, and in that sentence a word. The former went a little like this—

“SHIELD is going to consider you responsible for Loki.”

The latter, well, it started with an L.

A perfect storm had led up to this. Stephen’s reintroduction to the Avengers after Damnation nearly sunk Vegas into Hell on Earth; Loki deciding to test the newly rekindled team’s mettle with the sharp end of commanding the Final Host to destroy Midgard (unsuccessfully), SHIELD’s inevitable rebuttal once he was recaptured…

… yet, there was only one thing to say that came to mind.

“You’re kidding.”

They weren’t.

“It’d be too much on SHIELD too early to put down the resources necessary to inter an Asgardian, let alone one as resistant to imprisonment as Loki in the long term, Stephen.”

That was Cap talking. Stephen continued on with being frozen in disbelief.

“This is—this is a ridiculous thing to just _drop_ in my lap, you know! This is _Loki!_ Hand him over to Asgard!”

“Asgard’s got its own basket of turmoil to deal with. If anything, we’d be making it easier for him if we left him with them,” Cap countered. “There’s a reason why Thor isn’t here with us to discuss this.”

Stephen shook his head. _Great. Magnificent, wonderful._ Why not phone up Mordo and Dormmamu to join in, too, SHIELD, while you’re up and insistent on making nothing but trouble for the Sorcerer Supreme? Not like this day could get any worse than it had already become (in record time, too).

“I can’t do this,” he sighed, knuckles red-white against the table. “Loki is Loki. How am I supposed to do my job while have to babysit a trickster god with as much magic as I do, if not more?”

“The Loki of today isn’t the one that was the God of Evil.” Tony’s voice now. “From what Thor has told us, a reincarnation of a sort. One that’s seeking atonement, this recent debacle with the Dark Celestials put aside.”

Finally, those knuckles smashed into the table’s steel.

“For _God’s sake, man!_ That horned hobgoblin has stolen my title, my life, my _friends_ from me, and now you’re all suggesting I bring him home as though he were a stray dog? Do any of you care about what this means for me? For the rest of the world, while its Master of the Mystic Arts is distracted by this?”

Silence, save for staring. Stephen looked to Tony, and when there wasn’t anything, hesitantly, to Cap. Nothing.

This time the sigh partnered up with a pinched nose bridge.

_“Stephen—”_

“The Sanctorum will be ready by the end of the day.”

 

* * *

 

 

And, be that it may that the house of the Sorcerer Supreme was semi-sentient, sentient at least to know how angry Strange really was, be it by the castigated grumbling under his breath or his deadly glare toward the snakes, it was a promise that did not go unfulfilled. He prepared it. They readied Loki. And, much like Stephen expected, that was that, whether he liked it or not.

Loki’s face was rung out between shocked and, oddly, deadpan.

“You’re kidding.”

“I said much the same thing, now get inside before I drag you in,” said Stephen, whose tone erred less on ‘said’ and more ‘growling through his teeth’.

“Was my brother there? He must have been _furious._ ”

“Uninvited.” Stephen was holding the door open. “Suppose that SHIELD thought to break the news to him before they did me.”

Loki, apparently satisfied with the imagery of Thor smashing half of Avengers Tower, finally thought to follow him inside.

“And, for the record—”

“—You called me a ‘horned hobgoblin’?” Loki cracked a smile. “Yes, that I heard repeated from Stark. _Creative._ ”

“I was going to tell you to keep your shoes on.”

Loki shrugged, glancing about the place with an air of familiarity. “I see the Sanctorum hasn’t changed a whit in my absence. Do the snakes still accost everyone that they pass?”

“Guest room’s upstairs, first on the left.”

“Oh, come now, Stephen. I _lived here!_ I know where the rooms are!”

Strange, a blur, whirled around and shoved a pointed finger at the lip of Loki’s collar.

“Loki, if I hear another word from you about how you stole my home and title from me then tried to pass it off as the Vishanti abandoning me for _you,_ of all people, then I am dropping you off into a faraway dimension where you will hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing but the dark vacuum of space for all eternity. Are we clear?”

“As sunshine,” Loki answered, pushing away Stephen’s hand. “Wouldn’t want to ruin my one chance at parole in less than ten minutes, now would I?”

Stephen just snorted him off, breaking away towards the rest of the lobby proper.

“Wong! A bottle of bour—”

But, Stephen now realized, Wong wasn’t here.

In fact, there wouldn’t be anyone in the Sanctorum at all save for Stephen himself (and Bats) were it not for the unfortunate colonization by a God of Mischief against his will. No Wong, no Zelma, certainly no Clea.

Beat.

Before Loki found something to quip about, Stephen had portaled himself elsewhere—the kitchen.

As it happens, self-served spice bourbon had a taste of misbelonging to it, but alcohol was alcohol, and that, surely, had to have been enough—

“Stephen, while I admire the sheer willingness to drink yourself into a stupor while I’m about,” Loki was saying as he entered too (the door for him; a rare occasion where Loki was being less dramatic than he was), “We rather ought to discuss the elephant in the room.”

Strange, meanwhile, simply grunted and returned to his bourbon not unlike a dragon to its gold.

“What is there to discuss?” He asked, obviously rhetorical. “SHIELD’s short staffed and I’m reminded time and again of why I have always hated being an Avenger. I have my own battles to be fighting, Loki.”

Loki pointed at him. “Like the one you’re waging with that bottle?”

Stephen couldn’t find anything to retort with.

“Not that I’m suggesting a litany of _rules,_ ” Loki went on to say, “but don’t you think this relationship could be mutually beneficial for the both of us?”

 _Oh, God in Heaven,_ Stephen was thinking. _He’s already calling it a **relationship.**_

“Right now,” Stephen muttered, “I want to bask in my misery, Loki.”

“Yes. So I’ve noticed. You must be doing plenty of that. Aren’t you going to listen to what I have to say, first?”

Stephen exhaled, shoving the glass of bourbon away. Another time, old friend. We’re dealing with the most annoying, too-talkative, pain in the absolute ass God of Mischief for now.

“I’m a captive audience, aren’t I?”

Loki crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.

“We should work together.”

 _Spit!_ “What did you say?”

“Only the obvious,” Loki replied pointedly. “While I’m certain you believe I must subsist entirely on your misery, this is as emasculating for me as it is for you. If not more. Remember, Stephen, I had your job. I know what it ordains, what it takes. Why wouldn’t we work together, for as long as SHIELD’s temporary insanity lasts?”

Stephen perked up. “So you agree that this situation is ridiculous?”

“Wholly and completely.”

“And, despite this, you’re here talking to me about working together.”

“Well, yes.”

“I hate you, Loki.”

 _I hate you, Loki_ —I hate you, I hate your hair, I definitely hate those horns, I hate how in but only a year you’ve infiltrated into my entire life, I hate how tacky that gods-be-damned fur coat of yours is, I don’t care if you’re a reincarnation, reboot, redo, you all-new, all-different bastard—

“You can stop scowling at me, Stephen.”

“Whatever.” He snapped his fingers and the Cloak of Levitation flung free from who knew where and clasped behind his shoulders. “I’m going out.”

“What for?”

“To walk Bats. You touch anything while I’m gone, and—”

Loki made a motion of sliding a hand of his across his neck. Stephen nodded glumly. At least the misbegotten trickster knew which lines not to cross.

…

He did know which lines not to cross, right?

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m going to kill him.”

“Aw, don’t go sayin’ that, boss,” Bats said ahead of him. Bats, so it should be mentioned, was a basset hound in which Loki accidentally killed then brought back as a spongy green, talkative doggie ghost. Out of everything Loki had done to Stephen as Sorcerer Supreme (and there had been a great deal), Bats’ death was the most personal.

“What other choice do I really have? SHIELD won’t take him, Thor’s too belligerent as it is just for my having him, and now he’s asking to accompany me when I rescue Earth from itself as though I’m not already dyeing to hide my gray hairs!”

Naturally, Stephen in his raving wasn’t oblivious but rather uncaring towards the estranged eyes of those passing them down the Greenwich Village sidewalk, for they saw but a man arguing with himself as he guided a levitating leash.

“And how’re you gonna do him in? Last time he got the boot, he just came back, right? Even if a little younger.”

“Don’t remind me,” Stephen said, rubbing his temples. “I know how pointless it is to dwell on it. I was simply hoping that being an Avenger, even in a reserve capacity, wouldn’t have bit me in the tush this soon.”

Bats laughed. Stephen eyed him carefully.

“What’s funny?”

“You said ‘ _tush_ ’. All that ranting, and ‘ _tush_ ’ is what you came up with!”

Then Stephen, against it all, against the stares and the weird looks and the whispering, was laughing too. Howling, actually. Because none of this was real. Yes, he could laugh, as this was a dream, a very vivid dream but a dream, one he would soon wake up from, and everything would be normal (as normal as his life could be), and he wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore, or ever, and never see hide nor hair of the God of Mischief again.

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t a dream.

(But then, could you fault Stephen in trying?)

The Sorcerer Supreme returned from walking Bats in a mood so unusually chipper that even the snakes had noticed— _“Hey man, what’s up? What’s the big grin for?”_ —and although Stephen might have still listened to his age old adage of don’t talk to the snakes, he nevertheless rolled his shoulders as he went inside, happy as a button before leaving the lobby and into one of the Sanctorum’s many libraries for his hour of self-study.

Naturally, such a mood did not last for very long.

Stephen was at about page thirty-one into a book older than the dirt which the Earth rose from about prestidigitation and other conjuring when he heard a knock on the library doorway.

“Have you considered my proposition?” That voice… wait, who was this? The voice was a woman’s voice through and through, and sure enough, when his head instinctually craned to check, a woman was there. _A woman_ , alright: tall, pale, dark hair contrasted by bright emerald eyes sporting a chest to make even the strongest among us wince…

“Who are—”

Stephen cut himself off, eyes narrowed. It hit him.

He had almost forgotten that Loki could shapeshift. (And to think that he had nearly the mind to get excited that **he** was the one being accosted by a beautiful lady and not the other way around.)

“Don’t tell me that you’re trying to seduce me.” Stephen was drawn back to his book.

“I’m asking you a question, of which you seem to have ignored,” was the barb that _she_ spit back. “But since you’re wondering, no. It may shock you, but whichever I choose to present as doesn’t hinge entirely on what others might enjoy.” _Smirk._ “But I did notice your ogling.”

 _Ugh._ He couldn’t have a second of rest until this was curtailed, could he? “Loki, we’re not working together. You’re nothing but a god-sized distraction. And soon, a god-sized headache.”

She quirked a brow, and Stephen sighed. Okay, they really were doing this, huh. They were honestly, cross his heart and hope to die, really were arguing about this. Of all things. As if Loki, not only weeks before, had threatened the entire planet with the full fury of the Dark Celestials! Classic evil, megalomaniac, genocidal Loki! This was too absurd for even a fever dream!

While he was lamenting, she was holding up a finger.

“Once.”

_Here we go. Humor her or she’ll never shut up, Strange._

“Once what, Loki?”

“I aid you in your duties once. If I’m as distracting and useless as you say, then imprison me to the Sanctorum as much as you like. But a single chance, now, don’t you think that I deserve that much? After restarting the Dragon Lines such that Midgard has its magic again so soon after it died?”

Stephen opened his mouth to say something; maybe accuse Loki of wanting to manipulate him, or that magic never needed her help after the Empirikul’s inquisition to kill it, or any number of things, because Loki is as Loki does and that was a cardinal sin by itself, but his mouth was dry. Nothing pulled past his lips. He simply hung his head for a moment, stirring to look up in pure, unadulterated resignation.

“Fine,” he admitted. “Once. Once and only once. Your one chance, Loki. Blow it and I’m figuring out a spell to sever your connection to Yggdrasil, so help the Vishanti.”

Loki beamed a wide, open smile, the kind she always wore when she got her way. The _in your face_ grin. Smug as a viper and no less vindicated. Stephen, meanwhile, just looked tired and closer to his real age.

“Excellent. You won’t regret this, Stephen,” she told him.

_Something tells me that confirms that I will._

And then… Loki left. She was gone. No further fanfare, she didn’t even so much as rub it in (nearly as well as she could have, anyway). He was alone. She had actually left him alone to do entirely as he pleased.

First, the elation. The relief. He was _free!_ He could go on the rest of the night, totally and completely unbothered! Imagine the productivity! He might even be able to do some work! _Imagine that!_

Then he realized that this only meant that Loki was probably plotting something and Stephen’s head was in his hands, flipping through the stages of grief.


	2. On the Job

Maybe a little miraculously, Stephen awoke not to the pews of hellfire and brimstone of a world reaching its forgone conclusion, and instead the quiet stillness of a morning made picturesque by that it was eight A.M., a full four hours before noon when he normally returned to the land of the living.

His first instinct, then, was the check under the covers to make sure that he was wearing his boxers. He was. And then to look over at the other side of the bed such that it might be empty and not occupied by a particular, certain trickster god. It was.

“Oh, praise Oshtur,” Stephen yawned in relief. Loki hadn’t seduced him after all.

(Or, if she had, she made an art of a cover-up.)

Stephen, rubbing his eyes then to rise and pull back the curtains, revealed a Greenwich Village still half asleep in the throes of mid-autumn, not unlike a knight that surveilled a kingdom he was sworn by rite to protect. A Defender, if you will (although he couldn’t remember the last time Danny had called him—and if he had picked up).

It was now, in an ever precious moment of being alone with his thoughts whilst he dressed and even decided against summoning the Cloak, that he realized something profoundly odd. Odd, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he was now harboring the God of Mischief against his will.

Not sulfur, not wax, not even blood—Stephen Strange was smelling _bacon._

Now that he was up, rushing from bedroom to hallway to stairs to kitchen, Stephen briefly wondered if had been Wong. Surely he must have heard the news—even though that they were apart, it felt impossible that he wouldn’t—and had come to the Sanctorum as a gesture of solidarity between friends for knowing how unenthusiastic Stephen had to have been about the whole thing. _Yes,_ he thought, _that was logical._ Wong had returned to help him handle Loki, and when he would push aside the kitchen door, it’d be to the only friend he still really had, and they’d laugh, chew the fat, reminisce about the good old days, the very much Loki-less days…

…and we need not describe to you the depth of just how wrong he was.

This is what Stephen saw:

A figure (expected), manning the stove (expected), the figure wearing a green apron (expected), then them bending over to the side to reach something that they had evidently dropped (acceptable), Stephen’s eyes drawn to the fact they were wearing tight leather pants, showing off a plush rump (that dog… wait, tight _leather_ pants?)

It was as though his face were hit with a lead brick, should you exchange lead for disappointment.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” said Loki, having noticed him enter. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to wake you lest I eat alone.” The masculinity in his voice only furrowed Stephen’s frown; not only was it Loki, he had been eying up his _male_ form, as though he didn’t regret it enough already.

“What are you doing?”

“I do believe the _obvious_ , Stephen. Preparing breakfast meats. Of course, I had to buy them myself, as your refrigerator attempted to murder me several times—”

“You _left_ the Sanctorum?”

“For this purpose only, I assure you—”

Stephen (maybe rightfully) exploded. “We are not _**ROOMMATES**_ , Loki! I am _responsible_ for you. You leave like that again, and I’m going to be medium-well by the time SHIELD is through with me!”

Straining to keep an iota of composure, he threw his head into his hands. Damn it all. Damn Hill, damn her SHIELD, damn Thor, damn every last one of those sons of bitches for saddling him and him only with this. They must be having a party in that stupid Tower, and here he was on the ground, left fighting for the scraps!

“Stephen…”

_Oh, no, you don’t._ He stopped him with a hand.

“Just let me cling to the illusion of control, okay, Loki? All I ask.”

“Stephen, to put it politely, you look like Hel.”

“And what’s it to you? You’re a bloody extraplanar being whose ego we so carelessly stroke calling you a god, Loki. Don’t pretend like you have a sympathetic bone in your scaly, liar’s body.”

Loki, meanwhile, managed to be deadpan. “ _Stephen,_ you know that’s not true.”

He was turned completely from the stove now, Stephen unable to ignore the fact his apron said Kiss the Cook prominently on the front, or that the font bordered on Comic Sans. It was almost enough to knock him loose from the tirade, but he had to say it.

“Even if you’re right, I’m not taking pity from an omnicidial maniac. Why did you do it, Loki? Further—why are you still here, knowing I couldn’t stop you from leaving even if I wanted to?”

Instead of answering him right away, Loki went back to the stove, turning over the bacon.

“The Final Host was an inevitability,” he said, voice punctuated by a swell of sizzling along the pan. “They, much like an active volcano, were always going to erupt someday. I built the Avengers up—I built _you_ up—so that you may be at your strongest when I influenced them to arrive when they did. You understand? I _wanted_ to be beaten, Strange. That was my plan from the beginning. Now…”

Loki was chuckling, poking at the bacon with his spatula. “… now, I may have, as you say, _enjoyed_ my fifteen minutes of villainy more that I ought to have, yes.”

Stephen snorted. “That’s an understatement. People died, Loki.”

“None more than the alternative of letting New York City become Pompeii, to extend my volcanic metaphor,” Loki told him, coming around to present him with a plate. Glaring, Stephen took it anyway, sitting down opposite to the God of Mischief.

“I still don’t trust you.”

“I suppose that’s fair.”

Stephen wasn’t sure with which he was more surprised with; that Loki agreed with him, or that the bacon was less satisfactory and more the way of that he couldn’t get enough of it.

“Huh?” He muttered between bites.

“It’s true that you and the rest of the Avengers have little reason to take me at my word,” Loki explained. “Unlike my predecessor, I am not entirely unreasonable, and neither am I blind—”

“Heya, boss! I small bacon! You kill Loki yet? Wait… oh…” Bats phased through the wall, staring glumly at a Loki who was staring back, arms folded against the table.

“Hi, Loki.”

“Greetings, Bats.”

He passed a look in Stephen’s direction. “You were thinking about killing me?” Against the odds, he started to laugh. “I suppose _that’s_ also fair, too.”

Stephen, who somehow expected Loki to have instead threatened him or Bats with bodily harm, simply shrugged to play along.

“Bats talked me out of it.” He was paying more attention to the bacon. “Your brother would’ve done me in if I did, anyway. And, unlike you, I’m not a divine weed that keeps growing back.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Tell me about it.”

And they were both laughing then, not the laughing of two sworn enemies, but the laughter shared between almost friends, and when Stephen realized what was happening, that scared him the most out of anything thus far. Was he really so desperate as to subconsciously consider Loki as a friend already, a Loki who was forcibly living in his house already…?

“Hate to interrupt the bromance, but I’m as hungry as a ghost dog can be,” whined Bats. Now that he was brought back to attention, Stephen held out a piece for him.

“Thanks, doc.” It started to disappear into Bats’ mouth, leaving the wonder of what a ghost’s substitution of a digestive system might’ve been.

“Oh, and, never call it a _bromance_ again,” Stephen warned him in a closed whisper. Bats was too busy munching away to say anything, but had Strange with the confidence that he got the message.

That left Loki, who’d been working at his own plate by now. (And fast, he observed. That waifish figure of his surely wasn’t for a lack of appetite.)

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Hmm?” He asked, gaze slipping up.

“Why haven’t you left?”

Loki paused as though he were thinking about the question for the first time. His head rolled back, him testing his tongue, then he said:

“Because I don’t want to.”

Even Bats had stopped eating. “What?”

Loki held his hands together, face inscrutable. “Think about it, Stephen. Rationally, I mean. You and the rest of SHIELD think of me like I were my old self, the God of Evil, a villain and nothing more. True, I played the part I was given with the Final Host, but wouldn’t it erase any doubt from your minds that I couldn’t be anything more were I to walk away from my punishment now?”

Stephen considered it. Then: “You’re plotting something.”

He only smiled. “Maybe.”

“And I’m part of the plot.”

“Potentially, yes.”

“Loki, if I get any idea for what you’re planning, so help me—”

“—You’ll banish me to a dimension of cold space? Yes, so you’ve mentioned. I have not forgotten our official status as enemies on different sides of mortal law, Stephen. But now you know why I haven’t left. Do with the knowledge what you will. Besides, aren’t we on the job today?”

A finger was pointed at Stephen’s wrist. Snapping to it, he saw the time. _Shit…_

…they were going to be two hours early.

 

* * *

 

 

“A coffeehouse? Are you serious, Strange? What job of ours happens in a shop meant for hipsters and mortal college students?”

“You’d know if you hadn’t levitated the Sanctum Sanctorum ten meters off the ground to, and I quote, ‘ _discourage walk-ins_ ’, Loki,” Stephen replied keenly. “For the record, you yourself dress as a hipster would.”

“And you’re a wizard in tights.”

“Better than spandex,” Stephen concluded with a smirk, the Cloak of Levitation compacted around his neck as a cravat scarf, wearing a gray button-down jacket. Loki, meanwhile, although having the sense to not parade around Manhattan sporting his horns, did little to conceal his outfit besides throwing on a plainer shirt above his scale-mail between his coat. For a shapeshifter that could appear at once as anything he wanted male or female, Stephen thought him a tad uncreative.

That was the place and our players. This was the job:

Lyta Wyrd, a regular to this particular watering hole and a long time aspiring writer. Everyday around noon she comes into the shop with a spiral notebook under her shoulder and a pen in her fingers; everyday a few hours later she’s left, discouraged for not having put down a single word to the page. So far, she’s attributed it it solely to a lack of imagination—no matter how many books she wolfs down, no matter how many comic pull lists she’s finished, Lyta Wyrd believes she may never have an original idea of her own.

“And the ever esteemed Doctor Strange knows better than the writer?” Loki asked quizzically in return.

“Well, yes,” Stephen said. “It’s a classic case of an astral parasite feeding on Ms. Wyrd’s energy. She thinks she doesn’t have a useful imagination. Truth is, hers is overflowing, but the beast, much like a cork at the end of a bathtub, eats every last one before she has a chance to write anything.”

“Mm.” Loki’s voice was in his coffee. “How riveting. She’s lucky. Most wouldn’t have such an excuse like ‘ _a mind parasite is eating away my ideas_ ’. They’re just unmotivated.”

Stephen raised a brow. “And you speak from a place of experience, I take it…?”

Loki opened an eye. “One of my epithets _is_ the God of Stories, Stephen. It is, as you Midgardians say, in my wheelhous—”

“Shut up, Loki. I’ve decided I don’t care.” His glare brought Stephen a twinge of genuine satisfaction. Not like Loki couldn’t use an interruption now and again whenever he threatened to start monologuing. There were few punishments more severe than being forced to listen to Loki amble on about the futility of heroism, or how superior he and the gods were, or how handsome he was, or how clever he was, or…

“How long are we going to be waiting?”

“I already told you that we’re two hours early.”

“You expect me to quietly stare at your bearded mug for _two hours_ , Strange?”

“If I have to do the same for yours and those awful pubes you call a beard, then fair’s only fair.”

Loki scowled. Strange 2, God of the pain in his ass 0. Maybe having him around wasn’t the worst thing ever, after all.

Just in the top ten.

So, they waited. Loki eventually acquiesced to playing some game on his Starkphone. Stephen, on the other hand, practiced mental recitations of various stanzas belonging to the Book of the Vishanti, more for the experience of nostalgia as the enormous magnitude of spells from scripture no longer worked; you could thank the Empirikul and their specialty in magical book-burning for that.

And waited. Loki was now being avoided by the waitstaff, for they had never seen a man as willowy as he put an end to so many coffee cakes and had decided that they did not want the experience of watching it ever again. Stephen’s eyes were rolled halfway behind his head, his astral body inspecting his consciousness for any abnormalities or signs of Nightmare…

…and waited.

Of course, the obvious thought is to skip ahead. This was a story, wasn’t it? And stories which told the boring parts weren’t good stories, but boring ones? So we’ll skip ahead, glossing over the irrelevant details. It’ll be exactly ten minutes in the future, for what could really change so drastically in minutes you could count on your fingers?

Ten minutes:

Stephen was yelling for Loki, trapped in the stomach of a coffeehouse sized grub monster who possessed jaws of at least two-hundred razor sharp teeth.

For Lyta Wyrd and the rest, they could only see an odd pair of men sitting hunched over at a far table, holding hands and occasionally twitching. Weirdos.

“Loki, I swear by the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth if you don’t get me out of this monster—”

“Shut up, Strange!” Loki stuck a hard knock into the grub-who-was-not-grub-sized’s side, eliciting an ear-piercing wail and the beast’s attention to change direction and charge at him.

Loki, sweating as well as astral bodies could, smirked.

He was skilled at playing matador.

Really, Loki thought, what was the difference between a screechy, one track minded astral parasite and Thor? The mandibles as Mjolnir. The screeches as ‘ _Loki! You will pay for this!_ ’ The flying as the, well, flying. Not in any way that mattered, he concluded.

Those roars did sound a little like thunder if you listened for it, anyway.

_Alright, brother who is not my brother. Come…_

The beast, shuddering ahead.

_To…_

The beast, opening its circle jaws as Loki drew ever nearer.

_Loki!_

_**BANG!** _

He had sent an explosion of magic down through the beast’s distended mouth, to which it whined before being promptly disintegrated into a pile of floating, rainbow-colored ashes. (Oh, and Stephen was still intact. A story about adventure, not homicide.)

“How do you fare, o damsel in distress?” Loki asked Strange, holding out a hand to pull him up.

“Call me that again and I’ll think about renegotiating the terms of our agreement,” Stephen snapped, face drawing lighter at the hand which he took with neither hesitation or ceremony. “Sorry. Thanks.”

“My pleasure… wait, what’s that gleaming from the ash pile?”

Stephen walked over, bending down to pick up a small, prismatic stone from the center of the pile which soon faded away. He put it to the light, trying to identify it, and when he noticed Loki staring intently, hastily stashed it away.

“A Norn Stone,” Loki said, toneless.

“Whatever it is, you’re not having it, Loki—”

“No, Stephen, you don’t understand! You just squirreled away a Norn Stone. Part of the very stones which my former self used in defense of Asgard moments before he died! Put together, those stones can grant wishes, but they were thought to be destroyed as my former self had.”

_All the better that I put it away,_ thought Strange.

“Must’ve been why my magic was useless against the parasite,” he mused. “We can research the apparent resurfacing of the Norn Stones later, Loki. I miss the warmth of my physical body already.”

Loki nodded, muttering something under his breath as their spirits returned to their bodies on the physical plane. The world resuming to a familiar shape, one whose invisible parasites stayed invisible and most people would never know of what had transpired here, Stephen found himself smiling while he and Loki stood at the coffeehouse door.

“Not bad for a first time out,” Stephen said, patting Loki on the back. “But don’t you know that _side-kicks_ shouldn’t steal the spotlight from the real heroes?”

Loki twisted around with the full fury of his glower, popping Stephen upside the head.

“Ow! Hey, I was jo—”

“—you didn’t do so bad yourself, _side-kick._ After all, you’re often a damsel in distress.”

Then they left, arguing betrayed by fits of laughter.

Meanwhile, one Lyta Wyrd, hunched over her notebook, all but shudders with glee. An idea! Finally, an idea! She, as quickly as possible, scrawled on the page a most long and strange title…

“ _You and Me (Or How We Didn’t Kill Each Other)_ ”

She was just happy she thought of it before anyone else did.


	3. Journey into Mystery

It would be the prudent thing to say that nothing relevant to our story happened later that day, what with such mid-afternoon excitement. Prudent, sure, except for a few minor caveats.

A minor caveat, such as:

Imagine Loki and Stephen returning to the Sanctorum. The Sanctorum, of course, is located at 177A Bleeker St., in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It is a mansion in an era of high-rises, a haunted house in an era of debunking, the last standing testament to a world of the weird in a world that has tried to move beyond it, beyond magic, beyond superstition, no thanks to the landscaping or the enormous spherical window in which sits Stephen’s marker as Sorcerer Supreme emblazoned with cold iron. Why should this be mentioned? Because someone was looking for this place.

And when they found it, that circle window shattered to pieces and Loki’s jaw threatened to eat a pound of hammer-shaped Uru.

“ _Brother-sister! Your treachery will not stand!_ ”

He hadn’t even given them the luxury of a forewarning with thunder.

 _Great,_ Stephen thought, _family matters._ _My favorite._

(They weren’t.)

Loki, while that was happening, tried to say something but couldn’t, probably for that his mouth remained fifty-percent Mjolnir and for that he had been forced to the ground.

“Thor, let’s talk about this. I don’t like it either, but.” Stephen held out his hands as one might to placate an angry bull (or thunder god, in this instance.)

Thor wordlessly flared his nostrils, prying Loki from the ground whereupon he started to spin his hammer.

“That is _not_ talking about it. Shields of the Seraphim!”

_**DONK!** _

Wait a second here, the Shields had actually sustained a blow from Mjolnir, of all things? Perhaps Stephen wasn’t nearly as helpless trying to deal with these gods as he once believed…

“Your spell stopped me.”

“Yeah, surprised me too. Can we talk about this, now?”

Thor lowered his stance, although in keeping Loki in a headlock that had him gasping and blue in the face.

“My brother-sister has crimes to be atoning for in Asgardia,” Thor said.

“That, I have no doubt. Just take a seat, Thor, before your almighty bicep strangles him to death.”

Thor looked first to Loki (squirming as he was), then to Strange. His release of the former got announced with a series of breathless wheezing.

“My word,” croaked Loki, keeled over to the point of having to readjust his own horns. “If I hadn’t known better, Thor—”

“This is a conversation _of_ you, Loki. It does not _include_ you,” Thor answered, frostier than the winds of Jotunheim. Loki merely cleared his throat, slinking off towards the door as he rubbed his jugular softly. It was as though the entire Sanctorum sighed a level once Thor finally sat, face shadowed with the unknowable.

Stephen, who had been already seated, tried to stay cavalier. “Rough week?”

Thor simply stared ahead.

“A mutual feeling, then, We take our losses as a group… in theory, at least. What’s the status in Avenger’s Tower?”

“I have not visited since I was told,” said Thor, whose tone even to Stephen was hardly to be described as warm. “Out of respect for the mortal architects whose work I would destroy.”

An orange portal opened to Stephen’s right. “Tea?”

Thor made a face. “The gods do not drink this ‘ _tea_ ’, Stephen Strange.”

“Worth a try.” Stephen pulled through both a kettle and a cup. Once he was done, Thor hadn’t so much loosened an inch (not that such a thing was unexpected).

“Listen, I know your brother—or your brother-sister—is almost universally thought of as bad news, Thor. Trust me, he didn’t put on a good showing with the Final Host, or stealing my title if you want to go even further back than that. But, unfortunately, orders are orders, Thor. Maria would come here personally to kill me if she heard that I let you fly off with Loki.”

Thor sighed, not unlike the rumbling of a tall mountain—or an ornery one.

“I had hoped were I quick and sudden, then Ms. Hill would forgive you.”

Stephen snorted into the lip of his teacup. “As an experienced Maria Hill apologist, Thor, let me be the first to tell you that she would not.”

Thor perked up. “Loki has not enchanted you?”

“I would know if I was.”

“He has not bribed you? Blackmailed you?”

 _Sip._ “No, and no.”

The God of Thunder, incredulous. “Then why not allow me to take him off your persons, mortal sorcerer Strange? He would face justice befitting of his crimes in Asgardia.”

The Sorcerer Supreme, considering it. He met Thor’s gaze, recognizing that he had all but giftwrapped an out for him. Maybe yesterday he would have gladly taken SHIELD director Maria Hill chewing him out from here to kingdom come in exchange for not having to deal with the tribulations in keeping a trickster god on parole or even so much as the illusion of one.

Now, though?

Stephen hid the ghost of a smile.

Now, though, taking that out? Would’ve been far too easy. (And would’ve made for a swift death to our story.)

“I’m going to be straight with you, Thor. Loki is here entirely of his own free will.”

And when he caught Thor’s scowl, “Don’t give me that. You think Asgardia wouldn’t be of his own free will, either?”

“Not… necessarily…”

Stephen cut him off by shaking a finger.

“You’re missing my point, thunder god. This was never imprisonment. This is a test. And he knows it, too.”

“A test of what, Strange?”

Strange gestured with his teacup. “If he has changed, Thor.”

The atmosphere in the room changed in an instant. Thor, oddly for Stephen, looked far less relieved at the explanation than he anticipated; if anything, he was made _seething_ , but what he said after was spoken not in rage, instead as a eulogy:

“No,” he said, and in this he was certain. “I may love my brother-sister, and I do, because I must. But Loki has not changed. His chance to change was to accept his reincarnation as the new Loki, and not interfere while he grew and stayed true. Instead, he killed him and has left us without a body to bury, as it is his stolen skin he so callously wears.” Thor shook his head, watching the sky. “He lied to me. He lied to all of us. To impersonate our brother, not older than a _child_ , then to ask for forgiveness? To _beg_ for it? I did not give it. None of us have.”

He was patting the handle of Mjolnir. Stephen said nothing.

“No,” Thor repeated, and again in this he was certain. “Loki will not change. He is Loki, and he is my sibling, and I love him. But he will fail your test, mortal sorcerer Stephen Strange, as that is his nature.”

He stood.

“I have two requests before I leave.”

“I have all the power to give,” Stephen replied, maybe a brush hastily.

“I wish to speak to Loki in private,” Thor said. “As for you—do not get tangled in Loki’s schemes. I know how well he plays along as to seem unassuming and myself unreasonable, but my brother-sister is Loki. And Loki is what he is.”

“Of course, Thor,” Stephen was saying, now standing with him. “I’ll send him up right away, and you can trust me to take your wisdom to heart. If anything happens, he’ll be with you at Asgardia by first light.”

When they looked at each other, Thor was smiling, although it was a sad smile, a smile that imparted friendship and trusting, but ultimately, disbelief.

Stephen didn’t waste any time in calling Loki up.

“Oh, and Thor?”

_The stones. Tell him about the Norn Stone, Stephen._

…

“Be seeing you.”

 _By the Vishanti,_ he thought as he descended the staircase to duck into a library. _I’m already covering for the God of Mischief._

It was a time later, neither too long or too sudden, that Stephen heard another knock on the doorway.

“He’s gone, I take it?”

“Well and truly.” Loki was female again. Stephen’s eyes didn’t stray from his book.

“What did he say?”

“Private conversation, remember?” He felt her sit opposite to him. “But, perhaps, there was a lot of arguing, a lot of accusations, a little hugging, then the voiced thought that one Stephen Strange may pay for the damages done to his dwelling through whatever he needed from the coffers of Asgardia…”

Stephen was plain. “He loves you, you know.”

Loki had him with a mild look when he went to meet her gaze before she got the chance to bore a hole in him.

“None know that better than I,” she said. Then, in a much smaller voice, bordering on a whisper, “no matter what I might do to be undeserving of it.”

Stephen raised a brow. “If I heard you right, Loki, did I just detect a little _humility_ in what you now said?”

Her scowl was instant, waving him off with a hand. “Surely you won’t be hearing such a thing again with that smug reception.”

“Maybe not. But then, you were far easier to predict when you were only evil, Loki. What I wouldn’t do to get a look inside your head now.”

“Uh, doc?” Bats phased through a row of books.

“Yes, Bats?”

“You got a call.”

“On the old landline? From who?”

“From, uh, Zelma, boss.”

Beat. Stephen shot up from his seat. “I have to take this call, Loki.”

“You do that,” she said, smirking. “As for me, I’m going to bed early.”

 

* * *

 

 

_What I wouldn’t do to get a look inside your head now._

Stephen Strange has never had the power of telepathy; only spells that imitated the effect, and those spells are dead. We, however, are not Stephen Strange as to inherit his limitations. True, this story has focused on him for his point of view has thus far been the most interesting, but this is not his story. It’s theirs. So let us do what he cannot, and slip into Loki’s mind as she sleeps, dreaming although not really dreaming.

Another minor caveat:

Yes, Loki knows what you’re thinking.

You think she’s going to betray him. That’s fine—Loki thought so, too.

But, as we know, almost everything to do with the God of Mischief, Story-Smith, and (formerly, she promises) the God of Evil, is nothing if not consistent in the art of being inconsistent. She changes her mind as easily as putting on a pair of clothes, her schemes more open to editing than a first draft.

Naturally, she considers her malleability to be her greatest strength.

For the rest of us, it’s a living hell.

So what was the trickster doing, awake in her own dream? Pull back the curtain and see.

“Is it too late to call to adjourn a congress of minds?”

“None of us want to talk to you.”

“Something I said? Something I’ve done? We’re all Loki here. We should be able to talk to one another.”

“You murdered me and stole my body.”

“I murdered you a little. I grieve it a lot. Anyone else?”

There was silence in the halls of Loki’s mind. Shadows of her former selves glowering down at her as though, well, it was as though she’d interrupted something important even if she knew they had been doing nothing. The one who spoke to her had been Kid Loki, second to the left of King Loki, the Loki Who Burned, Satan-Loki, and the God of Evil. They are each united as a rogue’s gallery of the past (as well as a peculiar taste in outfits.) Our Loki, among them, is Ikol-Loki. The One Who Changed.

(They never did much acknowledge the fact.)

“That’s fine,” Loki had herself saying. “I do just love the family gatherings. No counsel for me, I take it?”

They looked to each other, then to her.

“You don’t need counsel,” said King Loki. “You would not have come here for that.”

“You’re my worthless copy,” said the Loki Who Burned. “You already know what I might say.”

Satan-Loki said nothing, but did smirk.

The God of Evil watched her, then said, “We are all but figments of your imagination. You never were any of us. We don’t know anything you wouldn’t already.”

Loki, who had been already passing through the halls, stopped on her heel. “Why is it that evil me is the one being the most realistic?”

“He’s not the only evil one,” offered Satan-Loki.

“A hundred thanks for the obvious,” Loki said sourly. “But you’re right. I don’t need any of your counsel. Knowing each of you, you’d tell me to unravel Loki’s Great List of Betrayals and block out a whole page for what I might design to do with the Norn Stones.”

Beat.

“I wouldn’t,” said Kid Loki.

Loki was out of the halls with the door slamming shut after her before she could hear anything more. _Family reunions._ About as useful as asking a mortal Ouija board for what to do.

She was, of course, looking for something.

The landscape of her mind rolled out to the horizon as an amalgam of forest greens and burnished golds, the internal logic for such unknowable all except to Loki (or the mad). For a god’s mind wasn’t metaphor so much as a place…

…a place that had her searching for four hours until whereupon she finally came across what she wanted.

And what did she want? A memory, of course. All that hunting for a memory. A memory she had expertly concealed (maybe a little too well) to hide the real prize within.

“Ah, yes,” Loki mused as she reached for it. “There you are.”

It was her scepter—stolen from King Loki, who in turn had stolen it from Queen Freyja. A scepter she’d hidden in the recesses of her own mind for fear of it being stolen too as was in the weapon’s transition. A scepter that granted her the power to do many things, the vastness of which unscrupulous, but also some helpful (if unscrupulous too, just less severely).

“You’re going to do bad, bad things with that scepter, aren’t you?” asked Kid Loki beside her.

“No,” Loki said. “Not unless I need to do bad things to save the universe. Win the affection, love and adoration of the Nine Realms, all that jazz.”

“You’re not a good person.”

“I never claimed to be.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“Has anyone?”

“You’ll kill us all.”

“And leave no-one to suffer through me?”

“Why are you trying to be Thor?”

“What does collecting the Norn Stones such that might not fall into hands even more untrustworthy than mine have anything to do with Thor?”

Kid Loki did not have anything to say after that.

Loki raised her scepter and opened a portal home. “Good night, Kid Loki, manifestation of my guilty conscience. Good night. Tell the Loki Who Burned his worthless copy is going to do something very unlike the word, won’t you?”

Then our trickster woke, smiling for her scepter was in hand.

_Now, let’s make some mischief, won’t we?_

We will.

 

* * *

 

 

Elsewhere still (our final caveat):

A monitor shines in a dark room. On the monitor, a still image of a certain astral body of a doctor holding a colorless stone to the light.

“Do we?”

“No,” an unknown, harsh voice answered. “These lovebirds will do that for us. After that… well, you know what they say about two birds and a stone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do believe we call that a "hook chapter", ladies and gentlemen. I hope to continue updating this fic at a rate similar to now, so watch this space!


	4. Calling

Zelma Stanton did not come into this world believing in magic.

She simply wouldn’t dispute it should it have decided to show up.

Before that, she had a life, as we all do. She found a personal magic-without-magic in books, novels of adventure, mystique, faraway places and comforting fantasy. At the time, these stories were enough. Enough in a world in which you could flick on the news and listen to blond, glassy eyed reporters tell you every which way the Avengers saved the day and nothing for those that they couldn’t. In its own way, her world was already weird, but a familiar one, the kind of oddities you’d invite in for a Sunday din. She still even has her Captain America throw blanket from when she was six. (What’s warm is warm.)

At first, like most voracious readers, Zelma wanted to be a writer. She realized, quicker than she may have expected to, that she was far better off as a librarian. (She’s kept those old manuscripts though, dusty as they are. One day, she promises them.) Fresh out of college, she was overjoyed to have landed a job at her local library, just a few blocks from home. Most of the money went to her Nan, but Zelma didn’t care a whit. She had the job, she loved those books. So it goes. She was, to put it bluntly, a mundy, and that’s all she ever wanted to be. Like us. Like a mundy.

Then, one day, you might say she broadened her horizons. Forcefully.

She did, after all, have a parasite that ate her toothbrush that morning on her head.

Zelma, although pacified with her given lifestyle, wasn’t absent from the rumors. There was a reason none of those loudmouths ever come to the Village, her Nan once said, referring to the villains so often advertised through the television. We got us a protector that they’re all afraid of, she said. Just his name’s enough to send ‘em runnin’ like rats scurrying through the streets. And when Zelma asked her Nan of what kind of name could do that, her Nan only laughed. Zelma was already asking: _The Destroyer? Starfox? Defender Man?_

No, said her Nan. His name’s Doctor Strange.

It wasn’t easy tracking him down—Zelma would later learn that Sorcerer Supreme was a byword for ‘ _ornery and reclusive_ ’—but she did. He helped her with her parasite problem. She helped him with his ‘ _Good God, man, you organize your books like THIS?_ ’ problem.

Zelma Stanton learned that magic existed, and as promised, didn’t fight it when it arrived.

They were… friends. Technically his apprentice, in practice his secretary and librarian. (Stephen, meanwhile, knew better than to fool around with his apprentice on account of what happened to Clea and that he’s pushing a hundred years old, don’t let his agelessness fool you.) She was okay with that. She was no longer a mundy, but she was happy, and once you got the hang of it, the magic was pretty cool too. She certainly couldn’t shower with a snap of the finger before.

Then the Empirikul came. Magic was dead. All Stephen, Zelma, and Wong could do was endure.

Blood in the Aether, the Weirdworld, those were the hard days. She’d saved Stephen by herself more than once, though, so she still remembers them fondly.

They were so close…

And then Stephen left.

Or was ousted by Loki and his illusionary tournament, but Zelma didn’t know that. She only got a note. Yes, she may have helped Loki with being Sorcerer Supreme out of spite. She may have even kissed Loki out of spite, too, but she tries to forget that ever happened (she hasn’t). And when Stephen became Sorcerer Supreme again, Zelma wasn’t in the picture. A note she could deal with, unwittingly housing a spell in her soul that could’ve ended the world she couldn’t.

Zelma returned to her corner library in the Village, but it wasn’t the same. Once you stop being a mundy, that’s it. There’s no way to revoke what you know. Not even through magic.

No Catcher in the Rye or to Kill a Mockingbird is ever going to hold a candle to the Book of the Vishanti or Xenu’s Twelve Incantations once you’re clued into the latter two. She tried, but they didn’t. Still don’t.

So, she opened some side gigs. They didn’t work out. Last straw was deciding of what to say to a cancer patient when their cards from the deck that never lies spelled it out. She couldn’t come back from that. (“Better get on with writing that will”? Ultimately, she lied, but regrets that too.)

Zelma called Wong first and foremost, maybe in the hope that he’d talk her out of it. Instead, he encouraged her.

So began the Library With No Doors.

Initially, it was slow going. A public library in the sorcery community—as public as these things could possibly be, anyway—was borderline heretical. Many were afraid it was some sort of Empirikul front despite their defeat years ago. But, eventually, people came. Donations came. Perhaps they wanted the weight of the books and artifacts and otherworldly stones off their shoulders, and no matter the reason, she took them in. From the nothing except her own hope, Zelma Stanton was soon having books to her teeth and artifacts in her hair. She had only one request for her patrons—

Don’t tell Doctor Strange.

They stayed to their word, probably for that he was far from the most popular figure in the community since that debacle with Loki and in staying true to how many secretly envied his position. Zelma assured—first to Wong, then herself—that she’d tell him personally when the time came.

It came—because something had been stolen. An artifact. She’d been keeping in the storerooms for a lack of identification on it, then one day it was gone. The magical locks she had put up hadn’t even been touched.

She called Wong. No answer.

So Zelma, sighing, dialed up the old landline only she had maintained such that he would know it was her, and said:

“Hey, Stephen. Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to be visiting in a few days. We need to talk.”

 

* * *

 

 

We need to talk:

Zelma, coaxing her coat further up her chest as she approached 177A Bleeker St.

The Sanctum Sanctorum, tall and mysterious as ever. She noticed the front emblem window was missing its glass and he hadn’t changed the landscaping since the last time she’d visited with Spider-Man.

 _It’s alright, Zelma,_ she told herself. _You’re only visiting and you’ve got a problem that needs his insight. Doctor Strange helps people. That’s what he does. Don’t even think of him as Stephen. Call him Doctor. You can sort out the ego boost that’d give him later._

Turn the knob, Zelma, and she did.

Welcome to the Sanctum Sanctorum, Zelma.

Don’t mind the sorcerer and trickster god currently at war.

“I am not a slave to your whims, Stephen Strange! I am Loki, prince-princess of Asgardia, and you will listen to what I have to say, and I sayeth thus: _Loki shall clean as he pleases, and how he pleases **ONLY!**_ ”

“Oh, come off it, Loki! You’re my prisoner and if you don’t put that staff down and pick up a broom, I’m sending you _straight to Hell!_ ”

“Uh, guys?”

“You wish for me to acquiesce? Make me, ‘ _Sorcerer Supreme_ ’!”

“Guys, Zelma is here…”

“I really do hate you gods! Crimson Bands of Cyttor—”

A hanging second. Then, in almost perfect unison: “Zelma is here?”

She stood there in the lobby, arms crossed and already unimpressed. “Yes, I’m here. Step—Doctor, what is Loki doing here? And why are you two fighting like you’re going to kill each other over, if I heard right, _cleaning?_ Hi, Bats.”

“Hi, Zelma. Loki’s here cause the doc is looking after him.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”

As for them, they both descended from the ceiling, looking as might two puppies caught in the act by their mother, faces soft and proverbial tails between their not-so-proverbial legs, Stephen worse than Loki.

“I wanted the Sanctorum clean for you when you came,” Stephen explained. “We had different ideas about how to go about the cleaning, and well, the situation… escalated…”

While he was speaking, Loki had picked up a vase and threw it at his face. He stopped it inches from hitting with a levitation spell.

“ _ **HA!**_ As I was telling you, Strange! Our first instinct is to cast spells to mend our problems! You’ve only proven me right—”

“Shut up, Loki,” Zelma said, and he did.

“As I was,” Stephen continued, gently letting down the vase, “I wanted to physically clean the Sanctorum as it felt more genuine that way. I figured you’d know otherwise. Loki wanted to cast a spell and be done with it. We argued.”

“And in doing so, created an even bigger mess.”

They looked to her sullenly.

Zelma sighed, rolling her eyes. “Okay, you oversized manbabies. Or godbaby, for one of you. Get it together and breathe…”

She gestured in.

“Breathe…”

And out.

“Okay, wartime’s over.”

“You’re still an idiot, Stephen—”

“Shut _up,_ Loki. Which one of you hopeless morons are cooking lunch?”

In the kitchen:

“So, we’re really doing this? Or you, I mean. Watching over Loki, Doctor, that doesn’t exactly strike me as a walk in the park,” Zelma said, seated across from him whilst Loki manned the stove, green apron and everything. “Oh and, he’s a damn good chef isn’t he? Who would’ve thought, right? Trickster gods and cooking? That smell is _immaculate._ ”

Stephen just peered into the shot of bourbon he was clutching between both his hands.

“Believe me,” he was saying, “it isn’t. First I wanted Thor to deal with him, then I wanted to kill him, which Bats talked me out of, and now I suppose we’ve… I suppose the only right way to describe it is that we’ve settled, for better or worse, for as well as you can ever settle with the God of Mischief. Did a job together that I might’ve been in over my head with without him, bickered each other half to death, but ultimately, settled.”

Zelma nodded. “And you trust him?”

“Not any further than I could throw him,” Stephen said, hiding a smile.

From the stove: “I _am_ hearing this, you know.”

“Good! Your smarmy behind deserves to hear it, for kissing me only because I had the Exile of Singhsoon, you manipulative prick!” Pause, then a look at Stephen. “Sorry. Guess I was holding that one in for a while.”

He wasn’t much hiding the smile anymore. “Well, you are in the right for saying he deserves everything that comes to him. Are you—”

She stopped him with a finger. “—coming back? Not now, not ever, Steph— _Doctor._ You deserve even worse than he does for putting that spell in me in the first place.”

Stephen went back to staring at the bourbon.

Some time passed, a moment really, before Zelma thought to ask a very different sort of question, leaning in to form a whisper, even quietly erecting the mirror dimension around them for total privacy:

“You like him, don’t you, Doctor? In _that_ way.”

Stephen paused, took the time to fully process what she was saying (and what she was implying), then proceeded to, as you do, flip his lid.

“ _What?! Are you **insane,** Zelma?!_ ” He snapped. “I—I don’t even like men! I have an ex-wife! Her name is Clea!”

Zelma stared on, thoroughly deadpan.

“Doctor, with the sort of tension you were sporting with Wong? You like men. I could make a scientific study out of it if I had to. Don’t make me have to.”

Stephen absorbed his shot of bourbon and hung his head.

“Okay, I like men. But not men like _him_. Hello? Twink? Constantly irritating and almost definitely a pillow princess?”

“You’ve given this some thought,” Zelma observed with a smirk.

“Oh, don’t give me that. It’d be obvious to just about anyone from looking at him and listening to him amble on for only a few minutes. Guys like him fall apart like a house of cards the moment you put some back into it. I can imagine it now—‘ _Oh, Stephen! I’m such a pain in the ass but all I really want is to suck your—_ ’”

He caught himself when her brow was threatening to walk off her forehead.

“Listen, Zelma, even if I did, which I don’t, in case you were wondering, he’s a _god_. One and done is the only thing you ever get from them. I’m too much of an emotional lark to endure that distance, not when Clea is still so, you know…” He made a vague gesture. “Fresh.”

“I won’t tell you what to do, Doctor,” Zelma assured him.

 _Smirk._ “But I can read between the lines.”

He snorted. “This conversation never happened, you understand? Pull away the mirror dimension before I do it.”

She did. Loki glanced behind him, curious. “You know, it was as though you two were a momentary blur…”

“Oh, you know, with this house, it doesn’t settle so much as spits…” Stephen trailed off.

“Yes, hm. Who wants these beef enchiladas? You mortals have simply _fascinating_ names for your food items.”

“Um… only all of them,” Zelma confessed.

They ate. (Bats, too.) And when the eating was through and the fat thoroughly chewed, Zelma took Stephen by the arm at the kitchen door.

“What I said on the phone. About us needing to talk.”

He braced himself.

“I established a library. For us. For sorcerers. It’s gotten a lot of traction lately.”

He was incredulous. “You didn’t think to tell me?”

She squeezed his arm harder.

“Let me finish. This is why nobody tells you anything, you know. Not official until Stephen Strange gets to plant his betighted behind on it. Anyway, something got stolen that shouldn’t have, and…”

She held onto him as though it were for dear life.

“…and—and Wong is missing, and I think he did it.”


	5. Blues

Doctor Strange has always believed in the upset.

A dice that’s rigged? Bet on the one it’s never hit. Sports game? Root for the 0-18. Always the underdog. Always the upset. Always the unexpected, unprepared result.

He has to believe in the upset, because at its core, that’s everything magic will ever be. Would you say that the chance result of a man whose fingers have been long since ruined in a car crash of his own making waving them around such to cast a spell is that the spell is found actually working? Or would you be thinking, _this guy’s crazy_ , waiting for nothing to happen? But something does. An upset of reality. The one in a million, every time.

Facing down the barrel of one of his allies—his closest friend—turning coat, Doctor Strange did what he’s always done.

He bet on Wong.

“Zelma, why—no, _how_ could you think that?” His voice was a trail, his eyes nearly full-black. He refused to look at his hands. Refused, but he didn’t have to in order to know. The tremors made sure of that.

“Calm down, Doctor, and liste—”

“ **Calm?** You’re accusing Wong of theft! Of leaving! And why are you so insistent on calling me _Doctor?_ ”

She took him by the chin, forcing him to look at her, no matter how he tried to shy.

“Listen to what I’m telling you. No injections, no ‘ _how could yous_ ’. When that artifact went missing, and not only that, but missing in such an effortless way, I got scared. Why wouldn’t I? I’m a witch, okay, but I’m not like you. I don’t have the ability to wish away my problems, and this felt like something else entirely. I was antsy. So you know what I did? I called Wong. But the rub, the rub is the line I called him on. The red button. The emergency, ‘ _oh please help_ ’ line. We had agreed that he’d have me back within hours if he didn’t pick up first, Stephen. It’s been four days. Now tell me, does Wong do that? And who else could ignore the locks I had set in the storeroom? The locks _you_ taught me how to summon?”

Stephen went for the motion of pushing back his hair but stopped halfway. “I can’t believe this… Wong doesn’t disappear, Zelma. That… what you’re saying…” His lungs emptied on the back of his sigh. “What would he even steal?”

Zelma shook her head.

“That’s the thing, Stephen. I don’t know. I had it in the storeroom expressly for that I didn’t have any good information on it. It showed up before I even thought to keep a log of my artifact donations as I was more focused with the books.”

Strange was beginning to pace, hands stashed in pockets well out of view. The tremors, uncaring, continued to hold.

“I—Wong wouldn’t do something like this out of his own free will. Someone, or something, had to have put him up to it.”

But what blackmail would hurt him? What enchantment would ensnare him? Wong was the unmovable where Stephen afforded to be flexible. A wall; impregnable, never changing, never waning. Nothing touched him. Nothing phased him. Not even when Mister Misery possessed him did Wong truly kneel. He fought, and would continue to fight, whatever might descend upon him.

“We have to find him,” Stephen insisted. “If he was dead, I would have known it already. Scrying him would be an invasion of privacy were this a misunderstanding…”

Zelma stared. “Wong might be missing, and you’re worried about an invasion of privacy?”

Stephen paused, then said:

“You’re right. We knock on his door, first.”

At the same time, back in the kitchen.

“And they’re off to the races, I take it?”

“Looks like it.”

Loki was seated where they had ate, holding up a hand which gently swayed whilst tendrils of his magic cleaned dishes over the sink.

“The urge of heroism possessing oneself once a problem so much as appears is wholly alien to me.” His gaze went to Bats. “How do you handle it?”

“Well, by not being some haughty god-type who’s gonna be atonin’ for thousands o’years of being an evil nasty long after I’m gone, for starters. Gets a whole lot easier after that, I think.”

 _Scowl!_ “You’re not going to let me slip out, are you?”

“Nope.” Bats was attentive in his watching. “Doc’s got me on high alert for that kinda thing since your, uh, bacon run. It was tasty, tasty bacon, though. Warmed this ghost dog’s old spectral heart.”

Loki said nothing save for the annoyed noise in his throat.

“Cause,” Bats continued, “if ya do leave, I’ll tell the doc, who’ll tell your brother, and if I know your brother, he’ll wring you like a sheet—”

“I know what you’d do, Bats.”

“Jus’ making sure. You do seem to have cotton in your ears a lot.”

Loki raised a brow. “And, pray tell, what makes you say that?”

“I mean, what’s another explanation when you managed to be so unpleasant so long? Besides the thick skull on you, but thas’ a given. You look like a punk.”

His scowl having gone exactly nowhere, Loki considered the choices that led him here, to this scene, of being lectured by Doctor Strange’s talking ghost dog while Stephen and Zelma had undoubtedly teleported off to begin their search for Wong like the heroes, the ever naive and stupid heroes, that they were. Loki. The God of Mischief. Here. Listening to this.

Then Bats started talking again, and Loki’s thoughts changed into those of anger for how hard it was for the gods to commit suicide.

Wong’s house:

No answer on the bell. Sunday’s papers on the patio and today’s Thursday. Door locked from the inside. No motion in the windows, no twist from the curtains. Stephen noticed but didn’t care about these details, because one dominated them all; the intangible but suffocating blanket of dread.

“Forgive me, old friend,” Stephen whispered as though Wong would hear as a minor enchantment let his arm phase through the door, it unlocking with a heavy clunk. It yawned open, dusty, old and then…

“Stephen…”

The house was empty. It was not unlike that Wong had somehow up and phased out of existence—evening clothes laid out on the bed, the kitchen pockmarked and hoarse with smoke of an oven left on, the television yet gabbing. Stephen’s face sunk as well as his heart.

“Damn it.” He was thinking of far worse for curses. “This is my fault.”

Stephen couldn’t bear the sight. “I should have set wards, checked in, anything—”

There was a weight on his shoulder. It’s Zelma.

“You respected his privacy, Stephen. Now we have to find him before something worse happens.”

Stephen Strange believed in the upset.

Now he had to believe in his.

“Let’s go,” he said, a portal opening in front of them. “We have work to do.”

The dishes were being put aside in a straightened pile when Loki heard the crackle of Stephen returning. He peered out from the kitchen.

“Back so soon?”

“Don’t test me, Loki.”

“Mm. Not at his house, I take it?”

Stephen simply glared, turning to Zelma.

“The artifact. We have to identify it. It should give us a clue as to where he might be headed next. Or whomever has him. I refuse to believe he’s anything but a hostage until we see him in the flesh.”

“Uhm…” Zelma wiped a dollop of sweat, clearly struggling. “It had a name. I know it did. But it’s not coming to me. I just… I don’t remember. That’s not like me.”

A second. Then, against all odds, Stephen wore a smile on his face. Neither Loki nor Zelma knew what to make of it, not until he righted himself and explained:

“An enchantment of forgetting. This is _perfect._ Trying to cover their tracks like this, we can use it instead to narrow the list of suspects.”

Loki’s arms were crossed. “And you intend to do that how?”

“I could destroy the enchantment outright, that’s no issue. But in doing so, that’d be taking an ax to every trace of it, too. What I want to instead do is surgically remove it while it’s still running, so to speak. An enchantment of forgetting is an enchantment of the mind. We go into Zelma’s mindscape, isolate it, then I can examine the spell’s inner workings for a personal signature.”

Zelma perked up. “Like Wong’s?”

“Precisely like Wong’s. If he was the spell’s author, I’d know. He was always a bit of an amateur at something like this—”

Stephen recoiled at the sudden elbow-shove to the arm. “No ego stroking while we’re talking about entering my head, Stephen!"

“ _Ow!_ Alright…” Setting his arm, he motioned them further up the hall. “Zelma, Loki, please do step into my office.”

“What did I _just_ say about ego stroking?!”

Some time later for the necessary preparations.

“So, let me untangle this.”

“Haven’t I explained it enough?”

“Shush, Stephen, before I go back to calling you Doctor.”

Zelma, lying on plush upholstery that would’ve reminded her of a therapist’s sofa should she be able to imagine Stephen as one. (She chose not to.) Loki, lying on the edge of a bookshelf, already having been given his time to regret having strong armed himself into becoming a “ _hero_ ”. Stephen, checking the reagents and lighting the last of the wax candles.

“Okay, so I lie here, the ritual begins, you two enter my mind, and all I have to do is keep thinking of the library and not any embarrassing or intrusive thoughts, right? You take the show from there?”

“Yes,” Stephen half replied, preoccupied with the candles. “Stay focused on the library. Ordinarily a ritual such as this would be risky, but I have an advantage I’m not ordinarily given.” He nodded to Loki. “I get to throw a god at it.”

Loki again, whose eyes threaten to roll back into his head. “I’m simply shaking with excitement.”

Stephen lit the last candle and the room became awash in a pale rosy glow, Zelma closed her eyes to better focus, and a portal opened at the center of the reagent circle.

“Just one request,” Zelma said before they went. “Don’t look through the ledger. I would literally cry in an instant if anyone know the organization hell I’m going through right now.”

Stephen pocketed a smirk. “As you wish, Zelma.” And they were through.

The Library With No Doors looked as might regular libraries would. Hardwood shelving, rows and rows of books, sections cornered off with the artifacts from wands to amulets to jewels and cursed dolls. (Perhaps the latter weren’t so common.) Except here, those shelves weren’t populated by the likes of Atlas Shrugged or Infinite Jest. You were, however, very much in luck should you be searching for the Thirteen Annals of Hoggoth. Expertly maintained, a labor of love, and expertly crafted.

“Keeping the mindscape stable, Loki? I can’t believe she never told me.”

“Wouldn’t want to endure a thunder hammer up the rear should I not be,” Loki replied coolly. “Can’t be the first time someone close to you hid something important from Narcissus Supreme, is it, Stephen?”

“Quiet, Loki. That’s beyond rich to hear coming from you.”

“I was hoping that’d make it more true.”

Stephen, exchanging a series of looks with Loki, turned off on his heel and started to wade through the aisles, feeling his way until he eventually came to the backroom door, Loki close behind. He was, rather instantly, perplexed. Zelma was right—if he inspected these locks, he’d know for certain that the magic ciphers in these would’ve stumped Karl Mordo on a brute force attempt (and that was on one of his good days). Their perp had _walked through_ these?

(Bet on the upset, Stephen. He kept trying.)

“Opening the door,” Stephen told Loki. “Cover me.”

Loki snorted. “Cover you? It’s an enchantment, Stephen. What else is it going to be? The Minotaur—”

_Ah._

Loki had just watched Stephen open the door and be promptly ran through.

_That’s what he meant._

The hit wasn’t fatal, praise the Vishanti, and was pure energy such that his flesh was unharmed and Stephen physically untouched, but it hurt worse than a kiss from Shuma-Gorath. Which was to say:

“ ** _FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!_** ”

Yeah, it hurt like that.

It would be an understatement to say that the enchantment fought back; it was prepared to go to war. Stephen realized this in the midst of all the pain, how it made Zelma forget its name—through fear, through nightmare.

It was awake, it was running, and it was _pissed._

Stephen, still dazed from the throbbing in his chest, cracked open a lopsided smile.

This punk was screwing with the wrong Sorcerer Supreme.

“Loki, trap it! Now, while it’s distracted with me!”

“I have to keep the mindscape stable—”

“Just do it, damn it!”

He did. By the gods, did he, only inches before another lance might’ve shot out from the creature’s chaotic darkness for a body and had a chance to acquaint itself with Stephen’s face. Strange, sweating, slowly slid the lance currently in his chest out and stood to view the hissing, spitting thing for everything it was. He breathed, remembering that he had to. But he kept his smile. He stayed spiteful.

“No, you’re not Wong’s boy.” Stephen reached to touch where the creature met the edge of Loki’s magic. “I don’t know whose boy you are.”

“Stephen, I can hold it for only so long…”

Ignoring him, Stephen continued to inspect the monster. Doom? Doom had gone straight. Dormmamu? Not this sort of finesse. What would he care for a mortal artifact, anyway? Then…

His eyes shot open, fit to burst.

Stephen cursed. “Loki, send us back. I know what the artifact is, and who we need to talk to.”

Loki was puzzled. “Who?”

“Don’t waste anymore time!” Stephen spat. “Come on!”

And when they returned, Stephen clutching at a ghost wound, he cursed again, and again, and again.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” He looked to the door. “I’m getting Tony Stark on the line.”


	6. Starktech

Let it be known that Tony Stark didn’t necessarily condemn Stephen to have to look after Loki out of spite.

_Necessarily._

But it might have, maybe, only possibly, at least seventy-five percent to do with it.

(Could you blame him? Honestly? They’re both suck up bastards thinking that every natural law need not apply should you be able to shoot glitter from your hands and graduate from Hogwarts. Practically made for each other. One of which just happened to be a god and the reason why the Avengers began to exist at all. Feels so long ago. He’s even picked up a fetish for fur coats and looking as though he’s lost and confused from the local boy band convention since then. Is Tony ranting between these parentheses because he has been thus far unsuccessful in being able to die happy between Loki’s female form’s breasts? You decide.)

He’d thought about calling Stephen over the course of this last week, you know how it is, extending that olive branch and everything there is to do with that. But he hasn’t. Not that Tony believed that it was a bad idea, mind, only that you could say he was… distracted. Since the utter madness of the Dark Celestials and learning that mankind were more or less cosmic diseases with feet and painful amounts of libido, the CEO of Stark Industries decided to take some much needed time to himself. The new Avengers of today posed the same problem of having to herd superpowered cats as the Avengers of yore, so Tony elected to think about possible solutions in what he would describe as a low stress environment.

We mean, of course, that he’s got a smoking hot blond sunbathing on his pool patio and arguing about a God of Mischief over the phone would entirely, completely, without a doubt kill the mood.

“Where do you work again?”

“I’m a freelance journalist, Mr. Stark.”

“And not on my payroll?”

“That would be considered a conflict of interest, wouldn’t it, Mr. Stark?”

“I know, but. Wow. Damn, chicks these days.”

“Would you like for me to include that observation on my op-ed, Mr. Stark?”

“God, no.”

So, Stephen called him. And when Tony reached for his phone, F.R.I.D.A.Y cheerfully announcing who it was, his face was every shade to the right of disappointed.

_**“God, no.”** _

He picked up, taking a thing of scotch while he was at it.

“Yes, you’ve reached the man himself. What’s with the elevated line, Doctor? Loki open a rift to hell or something? Piss in your Cheerios?”

Tony listened… then his face no longer captured apathy, but fear.

“Why are you asking about _the Mandarin_ , Strange?”

The Mandarin—

A once nobody, biracial Chinese-English man who’d been born into an opium den in mainland China. Discovered, by chance really, a set of rings that once belonged to a distance alien race which he knew nothing about in an abandoned cavern cloister. Mandarin’s Rings. Rings of power which once enscorcelled loyalty in both Stark and his long-time nemesis, the son of Obadiah Stane, Zeke Stane. Night and day Stark would work with Stane in a prison of Mandarin’s creation, force to foot the work and lay down the foundation of not only a mechanical army, but a dimensional door that would allow Mandarin’s alien overlords invade Earth. Every brick. Every steel reinforcement. All so some madman could watch his masters destroy everything they touched. He nearly had it, too, were it not for Stane learning loopholes through the enforced loyalty such that he and Stark could finally put the bastard in a grave for good.

He did, as you might expect, have rather the excellent reason for looking so grim.

“No,” Stark said. “We aren’t having this conversation on the phone. Come to me in the morning, I’ve got some… cleaning up to do around the workshop.” He glanced at the woman, fanning herself in the artificially created sunshine and heat of Stark Tower’s outdoor balcony.

For some reason, Tony was no longer that interested in ogling. He slipped off his beach chair, wiped down still-wet hair, and ambled back into the Tower, asking F.R.I.D.A.Y to prepare for guests tomorrow in his office as well as an evening set of clothes.

“But,” F.R.I.D.A.Y chirped, “You already have a meeting with the chief executive of Tesla tomorrow morning at 10:10A.M., Mr. Stark.”

“Let Pepper handle it. She’s a big girl. Musk’s not the drinking buddy he used to be, anyway.”

F.R.I.D.A.Y confirmed his request. Tony just stared out one of the Tower’s long, huge angled windows.

 _You better have stayed dead, Mandarin,_ he thought. _Or else I can’t guarantee the old Avengers policy._

The next day was more of the usual, albeit interrupted by a quick call from Cap who was, as he told it, handling some minor work on the outreach of Siberia. Apparently some HYDRA splinter cell, because of course they’d be hiding in Siberia. Nothing that the whole team needed to be around for, though, so Tony was only half-listening to the report as he had F.R.I.D.A.Y offer him a holographic selection of possible daytime outfits. The blond from the pool was sleeping soundly in the other side of the bed.

“Well, that’s good,” Tony replied, not having caught a word of what Cap had now said. “That we don’t need the whole team. I haven’t heard anything from Thor in the last week. I would send someone up to Asgardia to check on his sulking, but I doubt he wouldn’t answer to a teamup request even if he’s playing difficult now.”

“You sure we shouldn’t send anyone?” asked Cap. “I mean, he took it hard when Maria told him, and in earnest, I get it. He wishes the Loki situation was handled by now, and he feels as though he’s not doing enough to do it. I think he’d respond positively to us at least trying to check up.”

“His brother, or his _brother-sister_ I guess, is _Loki_ , Cap. I don’t think reminding him of the fact is going to make him feel any better about it. Strange called me yesterday.”

“What about?”

“Something I’m talking to him about in person. He seems to have gotten over Loki being his ward sooner than Thor has, though.”

“Well, I’ve got the final touches on the situation here in Russia to get to,” Cap said, concluding the call. “Be seeing you, Stark.”

“Be seeing you, Cap,” he said to an empty screen.

 _Damn. It’s been what, two months, and we’re already on the ‘be seeing yous’ and telling each other all the heroic acts we’re doing in the down time like Boy Scouts flaunting our badges?_ Tony pulled on a maroon shirt. _He makes it easy to forget that he was, or some version of him was, working for HYDRA not that long ago._

There was a dull sound in his throat. Wouldn’t be their world if it didn’t push for the status quo come Hell or high water, now would it?

(He briefly wondered if such a status quo applied to Gods of Mischief.)

At a similar time, back in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

“Stephen, you’ve been hiding in your room for hours.” Loki, staring.

“I am not hiding, Loki. I am mediating. And I did in fact try to scry Wong’s location.” Stephen, floating.

“Didn’t find him?”

“That I have not. Why are you here? It’s not like you to feign caring enough that I might mistake this as _checking in_.”

“Here to see if you’re dead such that I might be able to hold my prison break.” Loki was incredulous. “No, Stephen, I am actually checking in. I know, it sounds absurd, doesn’t it?”

Stephen slid from his position until he was on two feet, looking over his shoulder with an expression not even Loki could make heads or tails of. On one edge, he was stern. On the other, pockets of worry enough that wrinkles otherwise disguised on his face were clearly visible.

Loki wasn’t sure if he was choosing to empathize with him, or pity the poor creature.

“Have you even slept?”

Stephen’s silence said all he needed to know.

“Mm.” Loki dusted some fleck of dirt from his coat’s fur collar. “You know, Stephen, were we to find the Norn Stones, we need only wish to be where Wong was and we’d be there.”

Beat. “Is that what your plan is, Loki? Using my desperation to find my closest friend as leverage to collect your wishing stones?”

 _Tch._ Loki shook his head, smiling sarcastically. “You know I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Wong’s disappearance. Or have we forgotten about the part where I’ve been having my slumber party with S.H.I.E.L.D for several weeks now, well before Zelma says he’s gone?”

Stephen was but a hand away from Loki’s face, now. They stared at each other level for level. And then, clearing his throat, had this and only this to say:

“I haven’t forgotten. I also haven’t forgotten that it’s a lot like Loki to take every opportunity he’s been given not unlike a raccoon scurrying through the _garbage._ ”

Then he was gone.

Or they all were, really; Loki, him and Zelma—as he’d teleported them through to Stark Tower.

Stephen could never get used to the atmosphere of a skyscraper, let alone one as tall as Tony’s. There was a sterility in the air, a great nothing, that reminded him of what the air tasted like around the pyres of the Empirikul. Not a loss, not a detectable absence of anything, but nothing. Nothing, as was the worst of all.

Tony, at least, was mildly more happy to see them than they were him.

“Greetings, the Three Musketeers,” he said, pointing to a row of seats opposite to his executive desk. “Please, sit.”

“I’m not going to waste our time,” said Stephen. “The situation we’re dealing with is, put plainly, bad. Terrible, actually.”

“Yes, well.” Tony nodded to a screen that appeared next to him, showing live video feed of a fault some ten miles below the Tower, pointed at a case of rings in which only one was missing. “Let me clear up at least one worry for you. The Mandarin is dead. I know S.H.I.E.L.D were absolute butterfingers with the rings the first time around, but they’re safe underneath Stark Tower and have been for years. I check up on them personally once every two weeks. And you want to know how I know that the Mandarin is dead, Stephen?”

Stephen said nothing.

“Because I turned that son of a bitch into ashes with the repulsor ray once we had identified that the corpse on site was his. Without his rings, he was only a madman who knew a little Kung Fu. You don’t Kung Fu your way out of that.”

Zelma watched the tension between them closely. It was almost as bad as the one Stephen had with Wong.

“I know your man’s out somewhere and you want to find him, wizard. I can say to cross off the Mandarin on your list.”

“That leads me to my next point, Stark,” Stephen replied. “The artifact Wong may have stolen. I identified it yesterday. It’s the Veil of Vinktar.”

A moment. Tony tilted his head.

“Am I supposed to know what that is simply from the gloomy way you’re saying it?”

“Not necessarily.” Stephen reached out and opened a small scrying portent in front of them. It was one of his memories. A veil, looking as might a widow’s from the black lace and the red accents, sits on a shelf in the Sanctum Sanctorum. In another memory, the spot in which the veil sat is empty. Stephen started then to explain.

“Thus far, the Veil of Vinktar is the only artifact put into my possession that has ever escaped it. It is an extremely dangerous, very much sentient object that once belonged to a warlock who tried to mystically imprison his demonic patron into the veil such to escape a bad deal. It worked, but not the way he wanted—the patron took on the shape of the veil and possessed him through it, forcing him to kill his family and ultimately, himself. The Ancient One, who was my master and this planet’s Sorcerer Supreme before his passing, found the Veil and used a great deal of magic to split it in two—the veil itself and a necklace. Without one, the other does not awaken. It was his way of sedating the monster that lives within it as the veil has to be found all but indestructible.”

Tony, listening to this, raised a brow. “Okay. Mystical artifact of seriously bad mojo, I got that. But if the demon inside it doesn’t wake up unless the necklace is there, how did it get out of your possession? Don’t you keep those things under some serious lock and key, Doctor?”

Stephen leaned back in his seat. “I do. I, however, learned the hard way that even without the necklace, the veil is cognizant enough of itself to orchestrate its own escape, as is what happened here. When the Empirikul came to destroy magic, it was my sincere hope they killed it.”

“But they didn’t.”

“So it would seem.”

Loki piped in. “And the necklace, Stephen…?”

“If someone’s contracted Wong to steal the Veil of Vinktar, the necklace would be the obvious next stop. It’s fallen into the hands of a traveling historical art show as a ruby necklace from what they believe to be the time of ancient Romans. Unfortunately… the show has largely become a shell of its former self, a weekend long excuse for the rich to binge. The next show is in Paris this weekend.”

Tony considered it. Then he said, “So you’re here not to call the Avengers. You’re here for an invitation to a dance party.”

Zelma couldn’t hold it in anymore, laughing politely into her hand. “One way of putting it…”

“Listen, Stark,” Stephen said, more growled. “My best friend Wong’s life could be on the line.”

Stark threw his hands up. “Hey, I got it. And tickets are on me.”

 

* * *

 

 

Later, once Stark talked to the right people and made those right people sure that they could pull four tickets from the ether for an otherwise sold out event because he was Tony fucking Stark, he was lying back on his bed when F.R.I.D.A.Y pinged him that he had received a message containing a picture from an unknown, but elevated address.

“Uh, sure,” Tony mumbled, half asleep. “I’ll look at it.”

It popped up in a hologram above him. His jaw dropped.

_Jesus, Strange. What the hell have you gotten yourself into?_

 

* * *

 

 

Elsewhere still.

“I don’t think it was wise to send such a provocative picture to the sorcerer’s ally as you did.”

“It won’t matter. I was only having fun. Fun is good, isn’t it? Especially when we’re already winning.”

“I suppose. You can reveal yourself at the gala while I stay behind.”

Then, in unison: “And we all become one in the end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, you heard right, that's a dance episode next chapter, giving more focus to Loki and Stephen's relationship. Consider it an apology for being exposition heavy this time around.


	7. Deux Paris

Paris, honeymoon capital of the world.

Yet, in days like these, the Sorcerer Supreme wouldn’t have been caught dead counting the stars against a lavender-tasting midnight sky.

(Besides, he had long since been tainted to the notion of a honeymoon altogether. His last one was in the Dark Dimension.)

There was a job, and with some luck and a lot of doing, Wong would be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow behind it. But even with this comfort, Stephen couldn’t helped but be troubled in the belief that his most distinguished partner had been reduced to a hostage while whatever that held him gunned for the necklace that completed the Veil of Vinktar. He was missing something, he was sure of it. Of what that could possibly have entailed… he had next to no idea, and that single detail occupied his mind the longest.

“Must be ridiculous, the concept of having to hold out and just wait, isn’t it?”

Well… that single detail _and_ being heckled by Loki, of course.

“You tell me,” Stephen replied, blunt. “Or have I mistaken the sitting God of Mischief for a hidden God of Patience?”

Loki snorted. “More patient than you take me for, at least. Did you know that my past self once waited seventy of your mortal years posing as a servant to a cosmic being before usurping them and the power contained therein?”

“And yet, once you gods get exposed to the shorter days of mortals, you’re the least patient of any of us.”

“Not always a bad thing. Would you prefer if I had stayed evil for another hundred, maybe thousand years?”

“It would make this whole ordeal simpler,” Stephen said, turning the page of the tome he’d been reading, as unproductively as he was given Loki being bored today. “Then I could keep you in a box and be done with it.”

 _Huff!_ “You had your out, Stephen. You didn’t pull the trigger.”

“Maria would have roasted over an open fire, and to be honest with you, Loki, with the rumblings of a war in Asgardia, you’re better off with me down here in the trenches.”

Loki’s face was briefly shadowed with something Stephen couldn’t identify; he understood it as an admission of some guilt.

“That war will rip the Nine Realms apart, piece by piece,” Loki said in a short, oddly even voice, as though he were reporting an uninteresting fact that had already happened. “My brother won’t be sporting the title of prince for much longer.”

Stephen watched him closely. “And what do you mean by that?”

Loki, despite himself, just smiled.

“He’ll be king.” Then he went over to the drawers of their hotel room which wasn’t insomuch a hotel room rather than a private condo suite courtesy of Stark always under-promising and over-delivering, pulling out garment after garment to inspect. Naturally, each of them were dresses.

“This one,” said Loki, turning around as he held it by its collar. “The sequins on the neck are a bit much, I agree, but the rest of it is solid, don’t you think? Especially airy around the knees. I could dance for days in this and only want to visit the gallows perhaps once throughout.”

“Loki,” Stephen started, craning his head back to stare at him, “Are you asking me for advice on a dress when you’re both _a man_ right now and as though this is somehow an actual dinner party and not an undercover operation?”

“Stephen?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up and say yes or no to the dress.”

Beat. Stephen’s eyes threatened to see the gray matter of his skull. “Yes, the dress is fine.”

“Excellent.” He put it aside, hung up on a hook beside a tall mirror. “You should choose a suit to match.”

_Wh… a suit to **match?**_

Loki was incredulous. “Don’t give me that look. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The worst that could happen:

The hall in which the gala was to be held was long, decked to the teeth in gold ornaments and ivory accents, and as ruthlessly stuffy as a gathering of the insanely rich and famous expected to be. When Stephen had last attended some kind of parlor such as this, he was still the world’s most gifted (and most arrogant) neurosurgeon. He couldn’t say he looked back on the days with any real fondness—although his arrogance went on to become a feature of the Sorcerer Supreme, he never retained respect for the ostentatious like this. This was a gaggle of mundies with more money than sense talking their heads off to other gaggles of mundies with more money than sense. The “art show” piece was nothing more than an excuse to come as though they needed any.

“If anyone asks,” Tony was saying, and Stephen wasn’t truly listening, “The three of you are with me. Got it? The swarm’s gonna be diverted my way anyway. Just keep your heads down and put on the comm in your ears if you see anything suspicious. The necklace Gandalf over here was talking about the other day is in the center of the ballroom with the rest of the exhibit.”

He smiled at Loki, leaning in to whisper. “Wonderful dress, by the way. You look stunning.”

Loki smiled back, also whispering, “These heels could crush everything that makes you a man in one go.”

She left him alone with his bug-eyed look, threading over to Stephen’s side as the music started to play with the indoors orchestra. Some impression of Vivaldi, although the exact symphony was vague and open to interpretation. It was, anyway, an indoor orchestra for live music, to paint a picture of the level of ostentatious we were dealing with.

“Stark looks horrified and the gnats haven’t even set on him yet,” Stephen said to Loki. “What did you say to him?”

She smirked. “Nothing to worry about, Stephen. How’s Zelma holding up?”

He pointed towards the catering. “She’ll be fine as long as the food holds.” As far as Loki could see, she’d already descended on the platter of pastries as might a ravenous harpy. Completely squared away, then. She looked for Stephen and met his gaze.

“Do you think they’ll come?”

Stephen considered it. “No reason why they wouldn’t. If they’re confident in themselves such to think they could somehow control the demon in the Veil of Vinktar, then they have to be confident that they could either slip this necklace out from under our noses or face us head-on.”

Loki nodded her head. Then, smugly: “You’re expecting that they’ll do what you’d do, I take it?”

“Loki, being a beautiful woman doesn’t make me any less inclined for banishing you to Hell.”

 _So,_ she thought, _a yes on that front, then._

“I know, o glorious Master of the Mystic Arts,” Loki replied, hugging his sleeve such that any onlooker would have them pinned for two well-dressed lovers. “As you so love to threaten banishment. But I will take the compliment. You’re handsome when you’re not appearing as though you might clatter rocks together with, shall we say, the caveman aesthetic you’d worn for a few years.”

Stephen shook his head, already feeling the headache start to come on. No amount of fetching appearances or a sexy, midriff-hugging dress was going to change the fact that he was appearing as a boy toy cling-on for the God of Mischief. (As if she’d ever let him forget it.) He could at least thank her that she had the tact to leave the horns at home; the golden discs in her hair, not so mercifully.

“How flirtatious,” he finally replied, his tone as droll as the thoughts he were most assuredly thinking. “High praise coming from the god who could spend years unshaven and get no more than abhorrent peach fuzz.”

 _Tch!_ “That was to prove a point to Thor. He claimed that I couldn’t grow any hair below the eyebrow since my resurrection.”

“Mhm.” Stephen started to lead her away into the main dance floor. “And although you could, you never stopped to consider whether you should.”

Stephen ignored the scowl prominent on her face and let themselves start to dance. Admittedly, neither of them were bound to be any good at it; one hadn’t passed a dance class since high school and the other was a god derived from a realm systemically removed from such a thing. But the advantage of slow dancing that few ever talk about is that it’s simple enough to look as though you know what you’re doing, especially when both were as attractive as they were. Loki in her forest green dress, hanging low at the neck and trimmed with golden sequins. Stephen in his three piece, tall and brooding. (Stephen again, minding to keep his eyes where they belonged and not adventuring forth between the folds of her cringe-with-lust worthy cleavage.)

“You know,” Loki was saying as she tucked herself beneath his elbow and twirled, “They’re watching us, Stephen.”

“Who?” He seemed genuinely concerned with the idea.

“Oh, I don’t know. Stark. The rest of the gala. You can feel their eyes, can’t you?”

“Trying to ignore them, more like,” he sighed. “What does it matter?”

“Only the obvious.” She grinned, showing off every of her pearlescent teeth. “We look good together.”

Stephen’s brow ambled up to a new high. “Is this how you plan on seducing me, Loki?” Well, when she looks like this… He put the thought out of his mind.

“Stephen, I’m the God of Mischief, not a succubus.” She took him by the shoulder and they went around for a circle. “And before you say ‘ _could have fooled me_ ’, at least consider what I’m telling you for longer than a moment.”

A moment. Then: “Could have fooled me.”

Loki scoffed, hiding a smile. They both were. Never the agreement without strings attached, never the easy exchange. Always the back and forth. Always the tug and pull of an invisible wire over an invisible hole whose depth neither of them knew or wanted to, lest they find out by falling in. At first, the hole was friendship. Then it was affection. And now, maybe, its true form had finally been unveiled.

The hole of love.

She was, if nothing else, more engaging than Clea had ever been.

As for Loki and what she was thinking in that instant, it had nothing to do with her dynamic with Stephen (or even him at all). She was thinking, as you do, about Thor. About what they had said to one another before Thor left the Sanctorum those days ago, feeling now as though they might’ve been years.

_“Loki,” Thor said, pulling her close. “I wish I could trust you.”_

_“Why would you wish for that? Would I not be myself, then, brother? Would I still be Loki if you could?”_

_“Thinking that way is why you will never change.” Thor sounded as sad as the low thunder of his voice could ever be able. “I am not the god I once was. Indeed, I had lost my name of Thor, when I could no longer lift Mjolnir. But I changed. I earned it back. Do you see, Loki? We are not constants. Neither are you.”_

_And they were both silent then. Loki strained in the force of his embrace._

_“You will find someone,” Thor told her, after letting the silence sit. “But whether you accept to change is up to you. I will continue to love you through everything, sister-brother.”_

You will find someone.

And what you do after is up to you, and only you. Not destiny. Not your past, not your future. You are a trickster, and the only story you lead is the one you yourself write. Do you write yourself as a villain? Do you write yourself as a hero? Or do you write yourself as a path between? Are you not Loki? Are you less of yourself for taking the reins in ways no other are able?

Then those thoughts gradually fade, and the most important—the present—come into clear view.

“Stephen,” said Loki, taking him by the cheek, “Look at me.”

“Huh?” But he couldn’t say anything else, because she had stolen him into a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, it's finally happened, right? Almost as though things will go horribly wrong next chapter... but we won't spoil anything.


	8. Fever Pitch

What’s there to do when one moment you’re dancing, and the next, you’re being kissed by the God of Mischief?

For Stephen Strange, there was really only one thing that came to mind—he swore. Then when nothing came out, he decided there were two options and pushed back.

Which, as you might expect, promptly swerved right back around to swearing again and now it came through, because the God of Mischief—Loki, his pain in the ass, _Loki,_ empyrean pain of every ass then or now or the future, _that_ Loki—had kissed him. Kissed him, and he had made no bones about reciprocating, and now he won’t hear the end of this until, and probably not even then, the collapse of the Multiverse, and he definitely didn’t need Tony weighing in on this who’ll gossip to the rest of his superpowered boy band so Thor could crash through the Sanctorum window _again,_ and obviously right after he’d fixed the damage from the first time, and, and, _and…_

…And Loki? She was laughing, as you knew she was. Why? She kept thinking, _Wow, he really does flip through every stage of grief right before your eyes, doesn’t he? Incredible._ She would laugh just a little more with every phase until she wasn’t quite able to hide it anymore.

So, they kissed. One of them was unsuccessfully stifling her laughter through her hand and the other was preparing for the end of his life as he knew it. This was not, however, the most unusual thing that happened, here on this night in Paris at what was maybe the world’s most ostentatious art gathering. (Although it would make the top three.)

This was.

The strangest thing that happened that night in Paris—

Although Stephen was mastering the art of coming unglued while saying nothing at all, his gaze did snag on a sight that was neither Loki laughing at him or Stark making any brazen commentary. The sight was such:

Dark hair. Brown eyes. Of all things, a green suit—and it did not belong to Baron Mordo—but the look wasn’t right. Stephen was still staring, still taking it in, noticing how glassy they were, movements stiff and robotic, the lights were on, but nobody was home…

“I see him. Facial recognition’s hit a match, Doctor. That’s your man. But who’s he with? And why didn’t either of them trip so much as a camera on the way in? It’s as though they came out of nowhere.”

Tony’s digitized voice in his ear, and Stephen couldn’t care a whit. His jaw was as clenched as physically possible.

The woman—the woman beside him, dancing next to him, she was smiling, she was, she looked like, he couldn’t believe it, he refused to, but.

“ _Clea._ ”

He felt sick.

“Stephen,” said Loki, holding his shoulder now that the tremble that accompanied her name told her everything she needed to know, “Think about this.”

Stephen shoved her off, slapping a pointed finger right for her liar’s face. “Think about _**what,**_ Loki? This is, this is like a fever dream. If anything, this is something Nightmare might throw together. We were dancing, and the instant, the _second_ , the _moment_ I have a lapse of judgment, what do I see? Clea and Wong doing the same thing! I’m dreaming!”

Loki did not push his hand away, but her brow furrowed. “Do you honestly believe that, Stephen? That none of this is happening?”

His lips tightened, then, after the tense pause, heavy with exasperation: “No, it is. Not even Nightmare would make a dream this unbelievable.”

Yet the acceptance didn’t whittle away so much as a thread in the way of making it any less a horse pill to swallow. There were simply too many unanswered questions, questions enough that Stephen’s head spun. What did Clea want with the Veil? Why would she kidnap Wong and lure Stephen out like this when she clearly knew enough about the Veil to have combined veil and necklace by now? Was she… was she even Clea? Were either of them who they were?

Stephen finally had enough with the uncertainty.

Fortunately, being the Sorcerer Supreme came with a few perks.

(Or unfortunately, should you be a bystander in the way.)

“Okay, Gandalf,” Tony blipped on the comms again. “I know you want to raise Hell, but the variables are a bit much for a handsome skeptic such as myself. Does any of the Three Wizardly Musketeers have a clue they’d like to share with the class for what we’re dealing with, here?”

Stephen, as you do, ignored him to address Zelma over the comms.

“I’m here, Stephen.”

“The Veil of Vinktar. The necklace is still with the exhibit. I put a ward on it. Find the veil. They might not have brought it on their persons. You understand? We have to know where the veil is.”

“Uh, okay, sure, I’ll try, but what about Won—”

“I’ll deal with them.” Stern. “Just don’t get yourself killed, Stark.”

“Some plan,” Tony replied, muttering something about magic and pretension under his breath.

“As for me? Am I supposed to stand around while you ever so ruefully confront your past, Strange?” asked Loki.

He glared over his shoulder. “I’m not talking about it. Do exactly as I tell you.”

_Hmpth._ Loki shook her head. “My least favorite thing to do save for following rules— _following orders._ ”

But by the time she’d said it, the game was on.

Stephen didn’t waste a moment erecting the mirror dimension around himself and Loki as well as who were apparently Wong and Clea. His suit, may it rest in peace, dematerialized between an orange shimmer, leaving behind the Cloak of Levitation, his costume, and the Eye of Agamotto. You could say he was raring to chase the end of this mystery, even if there was no way he’d like anything that came next. Ascending to the ceiling then landing in front of the “couple” that had so far ignored him as though he didn’t exist, Stephen had this to say:

“Reveal yourself.”

She finally noticed him, glancing aside before a yawn. Platinum blond hair, lavender dress, curls—she did look like Clea. Even has Stephen guessing from a distance. But here, up close, within spitting distance from them both? Not a chance. There wasn’t so much as a hint to a Faltine’s presence. Naturally, that only had him angrier, his expression drawing line after line of barely constrained fury.

As for the woman, she replied with a nonchalant gesture toward herself. “Me?”

Stephen stared straight on ahead. Wong had stopped dancing, silent.

She continued, “Isn’t it impolite to disrobe in public?”

Should you listen closely now, you would have heard the rope of a Sorcerer Supreme’s restraint pulling taut such to struggle against outright snapping. A spring collecting energy, ready, willing, just about to pop. Rippling through his body and all Stephen did was sigh that same tired sigh. He wanted Wong, for this to end, and the woman seemed to have caught his drift.

“Him, I see. He was difficult. I reached into him, cut off his understanding of language. Nasty, nasty time sink. Took three minutes, twenty-five seconds, and ten milliseconds,” she mused were it might a casual, but boring detail.

Before Stephen could properly explode: “Shapeshifter.” It was Loki. “She’s a shapeshifter, Strange. Look outside the mirror dimension.”

_Look outside? This witch, hag, creature, she’s trapped in here with us—_

Oh, no.

Through the edge where their little slice of reality met its maker, the partygoers were no longer dancing, or eating, or admiring the orchestra, or chatting about the exhibit, made up as it was. They had changed. They had gone. Now there were tens and tens of clones of this woman, every last one grinning and happy, figures crowded around. What were they doing?

The woman inside with them perked up.

They pointed finger guns at the mirror dimension.

Then she said this:

_**“Bang.”** _

Stephen remembers the crashing, hard sensation of his physical body flying; he remembers the vacuum-like, disorienting cold of his consciousness surfacing through the Astral Plane; he remembers sensing, through the haze of half pain and half agony that she’d somehow shattered the dimension, sending he and Loki both hurtling violently as the real world rushed in to compensate, a gas invading an empty space. In a word—it hurt like hell. Only when that hurting began to flow out and his mind started to clear did Stephen realize he was not of his body, but spirit.

Whatever manner of creature he faced, she sure knew how to put her cards on the table.

Stephen wiped away a smear of soul-colored blood from his cheek and phased through the rubble.

“Bolts of Balthakk!”

So did he.

Neon red rays of unstable energy were summoned forth and shot through the tips of Stephen’s fingers, criss-crossing from Astral Plane to reality to ricochet from clone to clone in a fiery attack, their faces quickly contorting to that of fear and suffering, and this was good to him. They deserved it. This was for Wong, those sons of bitches.

Deserved it, at least, until when green magic sutured the bolts as Loki’s yell boomed past the showroom.

“You cosmic _idiot_ , Strange! She’s not cloned herself, only framed her image on top of everyone else!”

“What?”

It was true—sure enough, when Stephen returned to his senses, no longer blinded by righteousness, there was only one clone still yet standing, the same that had spoken beside Wong. The rest? They were keeled over in piles of heaps, their shapes fading to that of their original forms as innocent people. Innocent people he’d nearly fried half to death, and perhaps would have without Loki’s swift intervention.

Thus is why knee jerk reactions, while a specialty of his, never did quite end well.

The woman watched him with cloudy, inhuman eyes. She was not smiling anymore, but she did seem impressed with Stephen’s apparent bloodlust. Wong flanked her, the listless feeling of his persons having gone nowhere. It unnerved Stephen to the core seeing _Wong_ of anyone unreacting to what he’d done; he could vividly imagine the chastising he’d be belted with by now, and all there was in its absence was the silence, the glassy stare that focused on nothing in particular, the disgusting way she regarded him as though he might be a pet let alone a hostage. But, Stephen reminded himself, the anger he stoked over this nearly led him to commit mass manslaughter. Pained he was, he’d have to keep a level head.

“Feel better?”

And then he wanted to do it all over again.

The only thing that stopped him, really, was concern over his physical body replacing the desire to strangle the bloody creature whence she stood.

“The Veil of Vinktar,” Stephen demanded. “Why do you need it?”

“That old thing?” She tilted her head. Loki had taken the time to pull Stephen’s body free relatively uninjured from beneath a toppled painting, much to the latter’s fleeting relief. “To get you to come, obviously. I needed to meet you. You can call me One, by the way.”

Now he was bewildered. _One?_ What kind of name was that? An alias? No, it sounded more akin to a designation. She was magical in nature, though, wasn’t she? How else would she be aware of the mirror dimension from the outside enough to shatter it? It wasn’t the behavior he’d expect of some kind of construct. His ruminating was interrupted by Loki letting his astral form assimilate back to his physical body, her turning to him, then whispering:

“Don’t move. Keep talking to her.”

_Great,_ Stephen wanted to say. _Loki’s got a plan._

He couldn’t refute her before she faded into mist, “One” apparently too focused on Stephen to notice Loki’s sudden exit. He instead entertained the ‘plan’, for a lack of other ideas (seeing as his last almost had a body count attached to it).

“Alright, One. A meeting for what? And why do you have Wong?”

“Mmm.” One seemed to search for the right words. “What would you call it? A business deal.”

Stephen, in confusion, just blinked.

“The Norn Stones,” One continued. “You have one. There’s more to be found. What else… oh, yes!”—now she clapped her hands together—“Threatening you. Two mentioned that. You bring me the Stones, or your Wong gets thoroughly atomized such that not even the Words of the Black Priests could stitch him back together— _ugh_ —”

Her face took on a gasp of mild discomfort, but that’s not what had Stephen’s eyes almost bulge out of their sockets. This was the strangest thing that happened that night in Paris; One’s midsection… well, it’d been bisected, a wave of a particular trickster god’s spellcasting having done the deed as Loki revealed herself behind her. Except there’d been no blood, no gore, nothing whatsoever of the sort. Instead, her lower half, where there might be bones or muscles or the like, was instead a sickly green the whole way through not unlike a cross-section of some sort of alien goo. One huffed, then put her upper half on top, accompanied by a noise of suction of waist connecting to legs and goo suffusing to goo.

As for our dynamic duo, it was an understatement to say they were awestruck.

“That wasn’t what I wanted. You weren’t supposed to see that until _later._ Oh, well… I suppose I have to punish you now. Um. Time limit! You now have one month to find the Norn Stones and give them to me before Wong goes the way of separated atoms. Bye!”

She reached into her dress, pulling free a black veil of which got promptly thrown to the ground just underneath the exhibit containing Vinktar’s necklace.

“Almost forgot. You can have it, I don’t need it. Bye for real, now!”

No amount of spellslinging could stop her from transporting herself and Wong to gods-know-where in a gust of smoke. Neither would spell save fury of a demon being reunited with its other half, infernal glee roaring from within.

_**“FINALLY, I AM FREE! KNEEL BEFORE VINKTAR!”** _

It was a long night.

* * *

 

A small epilogue:

“I suppose this is what a storyteller would say is our call to adventure, is it not?” asked Loki, standing beside Stephen while they stargazed under a Parisian night sky. “I mean, it was fortunate that Vinktar was easily tricked into believing that the throne of Hell was unoccupied for him to take so Mephisto can deal with him, but the Stones…”

“I’m more worried about Wong,” Stephen said. “But I promised to myself that I would bet on him, and I’m not going to take that away.”

Even if it was satisfying to see Tony knocked out cold on the ballroom floor. He couldn’t even say it was only a little.

Loki glanced Stephen’s way. “Still not going to talk about it? You’re better at kissing than the lonesome exterior would imply.”

Stephen snorted.

“Still not going to talk about it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the weird delay on getting the chapter out--I've been sick almost all week. But it's November, so we should be seeing some serious progress as I try to burn through 50k words.


	9. Asgardia

The days that immediately followed the Paris incident were nothing short of quiet to the point of eerie. No Dormmamu bursting through the Sanctorum door, neither hide nor hair of Baron Mordo, Nightmare staying to his own damn dimension for once—it was borderline peaceful, save for the small detail that Stephen and Loki were to gather the rest of the Norn Stones and ship them off to a mysterious, apparently magic immune entity that called herself One lest Wong be sent back to them sub atomic.

As for the latter, well, that was an everyday Tuesday.

“We could call on Doom. Don’t you owe him a favor ever since that deal with Mephisto? Even if not, he’s gone straight.”

“He went straight only for that he respected Stark enough to keep the mantle of Iron Man warm for him while he was recovering. He’s busy in Latveria now, doing Vishanti knows what, and I wouldn’t be inclined to bother him.”

“Mmm. Suppose he isn’t the only ex-villain dealing with the call though she might be a tempting ex-lover.”

Beat.

“Not that I would ever be plotting against you in my current position, Strange. We’ve become _so close._ ”

“Your sarcasm is next to deafening, Loki.”

At least peaceful, even in the facade of such, didn’t preclude their consistent, quarter-on-the-hour banter. Stephen had become admittedly more gutted over the loss of the ability to wake only after the crack of noon. (Even an intravenous coffee injection wouldn’t save him now.)

They were in the kitchen of the Sanctorum, as Loki continued to define himself as a chef with Strange in no position to refuse the trailing of offerings, as food was food, and that was but gold to someone whose stomach couldn’t otherwise ingest but the absolute gutter of the world once he started flinging around more than a few spells. No sorcerer could—Zelma mourned her takeout, Stephen Manhattan pizzas, and neither of them were sure that Wong mourned anything at all.

Today’s breakfast of champions was crepes. Loki’d been inspired since their last visit.

“Did I ever tell you that Wong used to have long hair?” Stephen addressed Zelma, who up until now had been reading a book twice older than both of them combined.

“Wait, really?” She glanced up, stunned. “Here I thought he was born bald.”

“I believe it,” attested Loki whilst he duly manned the stove. “After all, my previous incarnation never went anywhere without his skullcap.”

“Okay, not that’s not so surprising. You look as though it took you thousands of years to figure out a basic fashion sense,” Zelma said, much to Stephen hiding his laughter with his cup and Loki’s visible indignation. The latter simply poured it into his cooking.

“It’s true. When he and I were yet disciples in the Kamar Taj. He shaved every trace of it shortly after the Ancient One passed and I became Sorcerer Supreme. He was, if you can imagine, somehow more stubborn than me back then. Insisted I was a demon. A handsome demon, but a demon still,” said Stephen.

Zelma nodded, putting her book aside to fit the plates they were being served. “And Karl? Any spicy, wizard college days stories I haven’t heard about him?”

Stephen just smirked. “Karl was always something of a twerp,” he said, reaching for a fork. “Albeit one with an inferiority-superiority complex and an almost commendable obsession with the Dark Arts until Dormmamu scooped him up.”

“I’m sorry, did you just say ‘twerp’? How old are you really, Stephen?”

“Not as inaccurately as Loki is all I’ll say on the subject,” chuckled Stephen. “I’m not the one with the apparent need to look no older than a day past twenty-five when I’m more than three thousand years old.”

“Please. In my defense, I died twice,” Loki said, burnished with annoyance as he sat down to eat himself. “Stephen’s ageless and still manages to look older than even my original self.”

Tch. He sped Loki a glare. “That’s a poor farce coming from you, _Lie-Smith_. Your original self appeared as though he might collapse of histrionics at any moment.”

“Eat the food I’ve given you,” insisted Loki. “And remember it’s because of my generosity you can eat to a regular Midgardian palate and not those unholy terrors you keep in your refrigerator, Stephen.”

 _Generosity, he says._ Stephen failed to believe a letter of that. (It was nevertheless too tasty to leave out in spite.)

They ate. And while they were eating: “Back to the question at hand, I think I understand the Norn Stones. And One is probably an alien or something. But how do we find the magic wishing stones the probably-alien wants?” asked Zelma, mouth halfway obscured with pancake crumbs.

“There’s a book that once belonged to Karnilla, Queen of the Norns, in Asgardia’s royal library. A collection of clairvoyance spells and the like. I found it boring as sin. But I do know it’s still there, and that it would likely be our best lead to scrying the other’s positions. For the record, One is definitely obscuring the details,” Loki answered.

“A blind man could guess that,” said Stephen. “She said something about a ‘ _Two_ ’. She’s not the only factor working in the shadows against us. And despite her being immune to both the mirror dimension and the Bolts of Balthakk, she and whomever she’s colluding with needs a magical artifact strong enough to grant wishes. That doesn’t add up.”

“Huh.” Zelma finished off her meal. “You know, a couple years ago, I didn’t know magic existed. I was just a librarian. And now we’re dealing with magic and probably-aliens-because-its-always-aliens. This is like one of my comic books.”

“This is my average afternoon,” sighed Stephen. “You could always return to your library if you’d like, Zelma.”

“And ignore that the probably-aliens are holding Wong hostage? Now it’s personal. Besides, I have a couple familiars running the place while I’m gone. They’ll hold the fort… I hope. What did you guys do with that evil veil, anyway? At the party, everyone including me just sort of… blacked out after a point. Even Tony. I mean, if Tony Stark blacks out, then—”

“The veil recombined with the necklace and released the demon,” explained Loki, smiling placidly. “Don’t worry. I told him a wonderful story about how the throne of Hell was empty and surely now we had everything to fear should a demon lord such as he go and claim it for himself. He’s solidly Mephisto’s problem now.”

Zelma thought about it. “Why do I get the feeling that’s going to come back and haunt us later?”

“Because if I know anything about Loki’s schemes, they always do,” Stephen said, drinking down the rest of his coffee. “But we’re on a time limit so I couldn’t argue. I’ve dealt with enough demons to deal with it later after we’ve taken back Wong.”

Loki held to his smile. “That’s how Stephen says I saved the day, by the way.”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “The book you mentioned, Loki. Dare I ask how we’re going to get it?”

“Oh, that thing?” He was stabbing the last of his crepe with a fork. “We steal it, obviously.”

_I knew he was going to say that. I knew, and I asked anyway, like an idiot._

“Uh-huh.” Stephen sounded almost bored. “Right. And we steal it, because I in no way could just ask Thor nicely to lend it to us.”

“Thor trusts you about as much as he trusts me at the moment for keeping me instead of letting him throw me into a cell in Asgardia,” Loki quipped back. “Which is to say, _astoundingly little_. Talking to him would not only be useless, it could alert him to the return of the Stones, and you and I both know we don’t need a thunder god getting between us and the Stones or you would have told him last he came to the Sanctorum.”

Stephen bewilderingly said, “ _You know that I didn’t—?_ Whatever. I’m asking him anyway. We’re technically brothers in arms ever since I joined the Avenger’s reserve force. He respects me.”

“And also remembers that one time you raided Asgardia with the Sentry to become the God of Magic for ten minutes, because you were jealous of me as Sorcerer Supreme.”

“Shut up, Loki. My point still stands.”

“ _The Sentry_ , Stephen. Do you know how distasteful that is?”

“You say that because the Void ate your previous incarnation, you smarmy twink fuck!”

“Hey, not to intrude, but are you guys going to kiss while you’re glaring at each other like this, or…?”

 

* * *

 

Stephen left.

Asgardia—

Although by nature of his title he’d been surrounded by divine beings such as the Vishanti and the Elder Gods of Earth and beyond, and it was by their willingness to patron him that the Sorcerer Supreme was so widely feared by the unscrupulous of the realm, there were few places Stephen enjoyed visiting less than Asgardia and its pantheon of gods. Never meet your heroes, as they say. Maybe the Dark Dimension ranked lower. And Hell. But besides that? Nothing really came to mind.

At least this time he didn’t need to bring Bob along for a third Siege on Asgardia to secure an audience with who he wanted to talk to.

“You’ve come to speak of… a book?” Thor’s voice was everything bemused. “In the Library of Asgardia.”

“Yes.” Stephen bowed to him, then sighed. “Please don’t give me that look, Thor. It’s an important book.”

“You are always welcome to read from Asgardia’s libraries, mortal sorcerer Stephen Strange. But we do not do this… what did you say it was? ‘ _Lending_ ’. I understand your libraries on Midgard were razed by the fiend you dub the Imperator, but the books of Asgard belong with Asgard’s gods. They mustn’t be misused.”

Exhibit A, for instance, as to why he hated these damn gods so much. “Walk with me, Thor. The way your father is staring at me on the throne is giving me the creeps.” The ravens on his shoulder weren’t helping the feeling.

As they walked: “Listen, you’re right that the Imperator destroyed many once great occult libraries on my world. Some of those books still exist and yet all their pages lie blank such that I keep them in my own library in the hope that one day they might be restored. It is also to my understanding that Asgard was left untouched by his inquisitions, yes? I’m sure it would not miss a single book going missing for a week or two. Hell, I’ll let you call a favor, if that’s what you want. Any favor.”

“My favor would be for my brother-sister to come home.”

“Okay, _except_ that.”

Thor shook his head. “You are trying to pull strings for Loki, are you not?”

Stephen looked aghast. “Why would I ever do that? I’m not pure, Thor, and I couldn’t lift that hammer of yours, but I have absolutely no reason to cover for that prick! It’s enough that I let him stay with me because of how badly he wants to prove to the world that he isn’t the God of Evil anymore!”

Thor put a sure hand on his shoulder, forcing Stephen to his face. “Sorcerer, I have had _**Loki**_ for a sibling for countless millennia. Thou must lie better than him for me to believe what thou say to me.”

And lo, a creek of regret in Stephen’s mind opened to a torrent.

Thor let him go with a pat. “At least tell me why you need this book for him, and I will consider it. I am far from heartless.”

“I… that’s none of your concern, Thor.”

“Is it not an Avenger’s concern?” Thor was miffed. “You and the inventor once went behind _all_ of our backs in the Illuminati, sorcerer. I am not heartless, but it is also not a god’s nature to be conveniently forgetful.”

Sigh. “I understand that, Thor. But this is a sensitive situation, and it’s not as though I’m gossiping about it to Tony like schoolboys, either. This is a concern of the Sorcerer Supreme. Is that not enough for you?”

Thor stared from a marquee window of Asgardia’s royal palace, silent for what felt to be a very long time even if it only lasted a fleeting few moments.

“No, it is not. Leave this place, sorcerer, and do not return unless you bring me reason or my brother-sister.”

And this was Exhibit B all the way through to Z.

 

* * *

 

Loki grinned as though he might be the Devil Himself.

“Well, it’s no Monte-Carlo, but I do have some ideas…”

“Just give it to me straight, Loki. We’re stealing a book from a realm of the gods, not committing mundane bank robbery.”

“Luckily for you, Stephen Strange, this is far from the first time I’ve ever had to infiltrate Asgardia despite being one of her most treasured prince-princesses. You couldn’t ask for a better abettor in this scenario.”

 _I could ask for a less mouthy, smug one, though_ , thought Stephen. He simply waited for Loki to get to the point before he changed his mind and divulged Thor every detail concerning the Norn Stones out of spite.

Zelma was in the other corner of the room, petting Bats’ sleeping ghostly form. She surely had something she thought was witty to comment with, but decided against it for Stephen’s sake. She hated Loki’s self-aggrandizing monologues as much as anyone save for the God of Mischief.

“Heimdall’s gaze is the largest obstacle, but not insurmountable in the least. I know of a place in Asgard where we might land initially that has been obscured from his eye for thousands of years and is known only to yours truly. After that, however, I should have some artifacts on hand in there to… _improvise_. It has been some time since my last heist, and Asgardia has changed since my banishment.”

“Right. And if this improvisation, play by ear ploy of your fails, then…?”

“Thor’s rage will be a sight to behold, and a priceless one at that. But you didn’t mention which book you wanted to take, so we needn’t worry about them expecting us, necessarily.”

Stephen’s arms were crossed. “Lovely. Just what I need on a Saturday night—a Chianti and the threat of the God of Thunder breaking me over his knee hanging over my head.”

“Yeah, I hope you don’t mind, Stephen, but I’m sitting this one out. Bats could use the company, anyway,” said Zelma.

“You need only trust me that I know what I’m doing,” Loki told him.

“Loki, saying _trust me_ is about the _least_ reassuring thing you could _ever_ say to me.”


	10. Asgardia, After Dark

Out of anywhere in Asgard with a description like “unknown to even Heimdall’s gaze for thousands of years”, when Stephen imagined what it might be, an otherwise quaint cottage beside a sheer cliff and a rolling, foggy waterfall didn’t quite make the short list insomuch as he was thinking some dreary hole in the ground where not even the brightest light would shine. Easy to forget that the realms of the Norse gods were largely untouched wilderness save her golden city in Asgardia.

He was watching schools of fish sweep through the lake the falls fed when Loki’s voice tore him from the introspection.

“Welcome to the House of the Forgetting Falls,” Loki said, sniffing the air. “A nostalgic sight for me. My very first annex.”

Stephen turned round. “Annex? Dare I ask?”

“Well, when you’re a trickster god and for you the entire cosmos is your oyster for adventure,” Loki was saying, waving Stephen on toward the house, “You get used to carving slices of yourself in a not insignificant amount of places. Decentralization, to put it in more modern Midgardian terms.”

Stephen followed on after him. “Right. Or when you’re a cosmic-level PITA so you spread your hoard all over so nobody can steal close to everything when they come back to haunt you.”

 _Shrug._ “Would I be myself without a contingency plan or two?”

“Your old self, maybe. What’s the scoreline between him and Thor? Zero to several hundred?”

Loki was opening the door, which sighed old and rickety until he finally pushed it through. “And look at me after the fact.”

“Yeah.” Stephen’s tone rang a sketch unimpressed. “ _My_ PITA now. What’s the story on this place? Looks like an ancient Scandinavian grandmother’s hut.” The creaks and wooden groans didn’t exactly end with the door’s opening. If he had to guess, Loki wasn’t exactly world’s best renovator of thousand-year-old hideaway homes. (Neither was he, should you have counted the Sanctum Sanctorum.)

“When I was a young prince-princess, an old sage lived in these falls. He was a troll, and had to hide here lest the drudgery of Asgard either kill him or send him back to Jotunheim, which would also kill him, only more indirectly. He enchanted the falls so they would create a rolling mist throughout the valley where the house occupies that Heimdall’s gaze would never pierce. Because he was a troll and not an Aesir, Odin did not notice the use of magic and so the falls have stayed untouched. He taught me a fair deal of his spells before he passed of old age. Naturally, I inherited the house and used it from my earliest days whenever the circus that is Asgard became too much for me.”

“Did he pass of old age?” asked Stephen. “Or did you poison him when he taught you everything he knew?”

Loki whirled around, and much to Stephen’s surprise, appeared at once genuinely angry with the sentiment, as though he might have spat on the grave of a beloved friend. Stephen threw his arms up.

“Can you blame me for wondering?”

Loki’s eyes narrowed to fine slits, and he huffed, but said nothing as he continued through the house, lighting an old lantern to give light to the aged interior. Stephen saw rows and rows of hardwood shelving containing all manner of books, artifacts, even weapons and baubles. Were it not for the fact that everything here belonged to Loki and therefore had a tag of unscrupulous acquirement, he’d have been no better than a kid in a candy store. Or a wizard in an occult shop, in this instance.

“His name was Áki,” said Loki finally, and Stephen could sense that he had not spoken the word in a great while. “In our tongue, it is a word for Father. My first saga was his eulogy. He’s buried behind the waterfall. Without him, I doubt I would have ever convinced my mother to teach me Aesir magic, although she did demand more than once where I had learned such _barbaric_ spells. She was worried I had wandered back into Jotunheim, I’m sure.”

Stephen had nothing to reply. Loki was different in this light. The same reedy figure, the same ice-pale skin, the same dark mop of hair propped up with the same half-headdress of horns, but different in every other way; his expression was changed, softer now, and his voice flatter, holding far less of his infamous guile, and his movements heavier, like he was finessing through time as he was regular space.

Then, he said: “Were you ever the God of Evil?”

Loki simply smiled sadly.

“Would you believe me if I said I was and I wasn’t?”

“I would say I wouldn’t expect a less complicated answer from you. Are we sitting?”

Loki raised a hand and summoned chairs from elsewhere in the house, gesturing to the one opposite to himself for Stephen, who sat legs crossed.

“The Loki that died at the first Siege of Asgard died forever. This was not his plan. He let himself be devoured by the Void then, in battle, a hero finally, because he wanted most of all to change since the cycle of Ragnarok had been broken by my brother. He knew himself well enough that only wishing it so wouldn’t be enough—he would have to die, and live again, so that he might have a chance of escaping his personality. So he bargained with Hela to strike his name out of her Book of the Dead so that when he died, he’d reincarnate. But the Loki that came after had nothing to do with him. He’s still pushing daisies in the Void’s jowls to this day.”

“And you are?”

Loki met Stephen’s gaze. “Never was my nature to pass the torch quietly, is it?”

He continued: “The Loki that burned that night to the Void left a long shadow. He did not create me, but I did come from him. At the time, I was a perfect copy—memories, demeanor, schemes. I lived in a dark corner of the Loki that came after us’s mind, whispering horrible things to him until he had walked into my trap. He redeemed our name, and I was fit to reap those rewards. I tricked him into an ultimatum he couldn’t escape from without letting himself be mentally obliterated by myself, joining our original self in the Void, and I stole his body with no-one the wiser for several years.” His face lowered. “The crime that will never be forgiven.”

“And your secret got out.”

Loki shook his head. “I suppose it was always going to get out even if I tried to stop it,” he said. “What I did damned me. I will harbor that guilt until the end of all days.”

Stephen let the moment sit, wondering if he should press. Eventually, when the air was still, silent to the bone, he did.

“And if you’re not the Loki that burned, and you murdered the Loki that came after, which Loki are you?”

“Just so: the Loki between.” He stood. “Come. We’ve Asgardia to raid this night.”

A small passage of time, rifling through artifacts, and explaining plans later.

“While I appreciate the heart to heart, Loki, I’m not entirely seeing where the Sorcerer Supreme comes into this equation,” Stephen observed. “With the way you’re describing this mode of attack, I’m here to watch you flex whatever muscles that needle-thin body of yours have as you steal the book yourself.”

Loki was grinning. “Sure. But doing it alone wouldn’t be a particularly interesting couple bonding activity, now would it?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Goodie. How much do I have to pay you to never say anything like that again?”

“I’m a luxury few can afford, Stephen Strange. Now: we start walking.”

“ _Walking?_ Walking all the way to Asgardia?”

“Well, you and I can both fly, so walking only figuratively. But my summoning a portal or you summoning a portal would alert them instantly. Our magical signatures aren’t exactly obscure at that level.”

_Can’t believe I miss the heart to heart already._

Thankfully for one Sorcerer Supreme’s rapidly thinning sanity, Asgardia was not as far as he anticipated from the House of the Forgetting Falls. Perhaps it was nearer, or perhaps Asgard had funky space-distorting geology going on. He couldn’t discount the latter considering how inundated with magic this entire realm was, and not of the plucky garden variety—Loki called it seidr, and whenever Loki called something by its name in his tongue, Stephen knew it was far from a toy. Loki had provided him a hood that apparently obscured him from Heimdall’s gaze while he himself merely turned invisible—vanishing threads of Svartelheim woven into his coat, he said, and Stephen wasn’t about to ask what dwarves were doing making the God of Mischief a coat of invisibility—so there they were, up on the marquee window Thor had looked through the last Stephen had visited, and he looked like a common thief. A common thief flanked by an invisible horned god. To steal a book from Asgardia.

Everyday Tuesday his ass.

“You’re sure no-one saw me scale the castle walls?” Stephen asked the air next to him.

“If someone did, this entire palace would be lit up not unlike one of your mortal Yuletide trees,” Loki said, forcing him to realize he was already moving through the palace halls. _Fuck._ Stephen slipped from the window and into the hallway, footsteps next to silent against the smooth granite (at least, he figured it was granite) while they sneaked through.

“Slow down! I can’t see you, you know, you see-through sack of shit—”

“—Shh! Quickly, flat against the wall!”

Stephen instantly snapped to the side, body flush beside a pillar. A rank and file line of what he presumed were guardsmen marched from the hall adjacent to his, and for a moment he thought they were going to turn down his alley, but they kept on walking such that he peeled himself off (and wiped down a bead of sweat) once the clatter of boots drew far enough to become a whisper.

“That was why I was moving ahead of you,” Loki told behind him. “To see danger ahead.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Stephen continued to mosey at the angle closest to the nearest wall. “Could have told me that, too, but you love omitting anything important.”

“Bad habit. Truce?”

“Truce.” He was already too deep in this insane plan of Loki’s to turn back now, for better or worse. He was betting on worse. “Where’s the library?”

“Up ahead. I see two guards manning the entrance, and they’re not moving.”

“Ookay. And we get rid of them how?”

“My first idea is to set them away with an illusion.”

“An illusion of…”

“Lady Freya, of course. She’s known to come to the library at this time of night to read while my father sleeps. And the guards are in no shape to question her considering how recently she’s recovered from near death.”

“Uh-huh. And that lets me in how?”

“I make you look like her. Keep up, Stephen.”

Beat.

“I have to talk like the Queen of Asgard.”

“Not very hard, if I’m being honest. Come on!”

Somehow, against every odd known to man, it worked. Stephen couldn’t believe it until it had already happened, but it worked. Loki was right—acting haughty to a pair of guards was easier than he anticipated, as much as a voice in his head told him that it coming to him as easy it did said more about him than the ease of the plan. Loki simply followed behind him and closed the doors to leave them alone in the library of Asgardia…

…the extremely large, extremely spanning library of Asgardia.

_**Fuck.** _

Needless to say, by the time they had found the book in question and returned to the House of the Forgetting Falls, the sun was pulling up.

“I am never, ever doing that again for a single book,” Stephen swore. “I barely get enough sleep when I’m in bed until noon, for Hoggoth’s sake!”

“Quiet, Stephen. We got the book, and they’re none the wiser. Would you prefer Thor having found us?”

“Having found _me_ , you mean. You were invisible the entire time, you weasel.”

Loki smirked, a portal opening back to the Sanctorum behind him that Stephen was all too ready to wade through.

“Besides,” Loki was saying as their physicality jumped from Asgard to Greenwich Village, “Now you can say you own a book of the gods in your library as a point of pride.”

“A book of the pantheon of gods I like the least. What an achievement. Let’s just get this ritual done and over with.”

Zelma and Bats were, unsurprisingly, still asleep in the foyer when they returned. Stephen pulled a blanket onto them both for what little there was left before morning arrived in full. Pulling into Stephen’s favorite study—like most rooms in the Sanctorum, there were redundancies—Loki laid the book flat on his desk and opened it to a particular page a little more than half past the middle.

“Ah, yes. As I remembered. A clairvoyance spell specifically evoking the Norn Stones,” Loki read. “While it won’t scry every location at once, each stone has a sibling stone it will call on, much in a circle. We have one, which finds one, and that one will find one, and so on.”

“How many stones are there in total?” asked Stephen.

“Ordinarily, eight. But I’m unsure if their return to the universe was… perfect. I’m guessing five, for now. Could be more than the original eight, as well.”

“Guess five,” Stephen said. “For Wong’s sake.”

“Yes…” Loki looked up, putting out an open hand. “Your stone, Stephen. I doubt you can read Old Asgardian.”

It wasn’t as though Stephen was to pass him an Infinity Stone, but it sure felt close. He took it out of the small pocket dimension he’d stowed it in the first time, then tentatively, very ruefully, placed it in Loki’s palm. Loki’s smile on receiving it didn’t quite help Stephen escaping the feeling that he’d handed off something a touch too powerful to be giving to the God of Mischief.

“Excellent.” Loki started making hand signals in the air, the trail of his fingers creating a green celtic knot in front of the stone. His eyes glowed with power, mouth ajar as he adjusted to the vision that was flooding within him, and then…

Then it was over nearly as soon as it started, and he looked almost _disappointed._

“Did it not work?” asked Stephen, brow raised.

Loki dragged a hand over his forehead. “No, no. Worked as I expected. Just the location… _eugh._ ”

“Where is it?”

“Hell’s Kitchen.”


	11. Contrivance

“Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Afraid so.”

“You know,” Stephen was saying, now inclined in the coziest chair of the study (if the Sanctorum was good at anything besides the weird and the occult, it was age-old comfy chairs), “When I think Hell’s Kitchen, I think Daredevil. Small scale, street level fare. So what’s a decidedly not street level Norn Stone doing there? Are we raiding the Kingpin’s trust fund?”

“Luckily, hopefully nothing that tedious,” replied Loki, who spied a pockmarked glance Stephen’s way. “Strange, are you—are you _nodding off?_ ”

His eyes were in fact closed and his legs in fact propped up on an ottoman, so it wasn’t exactly astute observation. He found the strength to pry only one open to meet Loki halfway.

“Loki, I’m a man whose natural clock dictates I rouse only past noon and for the last week and a half I’ve woken up at eight in the morning to entertain your breakfast-making adventures and now I just pulled an all-nighter searching for one misbegotten book in the entire Library of Asgardia.” Pause for effect. “Yes, I might be a _little_ tired.”

“Alas, poor Doctor Strange,” said Loki, grinning sans mercy. “Shall I tuck you in?”

“Not before I kill you first. Back to the stone. If it’s not with the Kingpin, my short list isn’t what you might call prodigal.”

In lieu of answering directly, Loki opened a portent in front of them. A slice of his vision, viewed through a disembodied, green-shifted screen. Typical Manhattan bustle. Cars in gridlock. Obscenities in at least thirteen different languages. Above everything, a white LCD rack whose signage glowed black.

It said: ‘ _LA TOWNSEN._ ’

“You’re kidding.” Now Stephen really did wish he was knocked out. (Or dead.)

“Perhaps the only restaurant you could be so bold as to call upscale in the entire borough. Don’t worry, I won’t call it a date.”

“Forget whatever you might call it, this is ridiculous,” Stephen said miserably, and then the only further sound from him was a snore.

Loki stood there for some while, like he might be waiting for something—or debating that something—but he eventually acquiesced to take Stephen in his arms bridal style and start the march out of the study and into his bedroom, navigating the damnable house’s MC Etscher inspired stairs and all.

“Midgard’s Sorcerer Supreme,” he muttered under his breath. “To think he so often calls me the pain in the arse.”

He was, of course, ignoring how accurate the title regularly was.

Pulling into Stephen’s bedroom after having to wordlessly bargain with the Cloak of Levitation to give him a pointer as to which way and passing the snakes and a sheaf of seemingly random occult instruments dangling from ceiling to ceiling. (The snakes, for their worth, did not abet Loki like they did anyone else. Maybe on a gentleman’s agreement of kin.)

Now, a question. When you imagine an ‘event horizon’—a turning point where the door slams shut behind you, no way out but through—what is the first that comes to mind? A killer and his first victim? A villain and their condemnation to an endless cycle of revenge? High concept. High drama. Stakes laid finely out on the table and the characters sweating every second.

For Loki, he had many such events, as he was Loki, and his particular story is so winding that it couldn’t be properly articulated detail to detail without being another novel unto itself. His murder of Kid Loki. His telling the truth to Thor. His defeating of King Loki, the becoming of the God of Stories.

And now, for the spectacular, dazzling fifth installment…

…it was when he decided to curl up next to Stephen as he slept there, too.

We suppose you can’t always be trusted to carry an ever escalating series of stakes.

Dreaming—

It is misleading to say Stephen Strange dreams. He dreams, sure, but they’re waking dreams, walking dreams, the lucid kind, and they have been this way since the Ancient One first taught him how to tame the astral from the physical at the Kamar Taj. It could be inferred that this has made him unimaginative. In his own words, he’s more happy to have the control than to play out nightmare after nightmare of the same sheer cliff on a highway whose number he doesn’t remember anymore but whose snapped guardrails as he tumbled back to the earth he surely does.

And now, rather miraculously, he was dreaming again.

Except it was no miracle. You know why.

For one thing, the dream scene is no assembly of New York City, or a farm in Nebraska. It’s Asgard.

“Cold,” a young, but not-that-high voice said, and Stephen figured this was a young Thor, although he for this second was still disoriented with the particular mechanics of sleeping and then now, apparently, experiencing someone else’s dream in real time, before his own eyes. And they do not seem to have noticed him, which he was grateful for, so he listened and listened only.

“I don’t think it’s that cold. You’re soft in the skin,” another voice said, and Stephen didn’t need to guess to know whose it was.

“Umm. But you’re a frost giant, and they like the cold. I’m not a frost giant, so I don’t like the cold. See?”

“I’m not a frost giant.”

The image became sharper now, and Stephen saw two boys, one light haired and the other dark, standing over a hole in an iced-over lake. They were fishing. Or waiting for the fish to come out and greet them, more like. For what it was worth, he thought it was damn cold.

“Yes you are,” Thor said. “They brought you back from Laufey’s kingdom. Jotunheim.”

“Sure. But I’m not a frost giant. Not anymore. I gave that up, you know. They would never take me back.”

“They wouldn’t take you back because you’re a prince of Asgard now, Loki.” Thor smiled, bright and wide. “My brother.”

“Also my real dad is an oaf and I would kill him if he wasn’t already dead.”

“Don’t be so glum.” They continued to huddle over the hole. “Any fish?”

It occurred to Stephen now that if he was experiencing Loki’s dream, then Loki must’ve brought him back to his room and decided to sleep beside him, the idiot. He would have woken them both up at this realization if he didn’t also know how too-tired he was in the real world to want to go through the motions of raising Hell, shooing the God of Mischief out of his room, and snapping the door shut behind him for maybe three or four hours of sleep until something invariably came up for him to deal with. Like another astral parasite in someone’s mind. Or an old woman complaining of oddly specific hot flashes. Or…

“No fish,” Loki declared, threading the line back in the water. “Maybe you’re talking too loudly, Thor. Scaring them off.”

“Huh.” Thor thought about it. “Why would the fish care about what I have to say?”

Now Loki smiled, getting in his face. “Because you sound too much like them. Like this— _glub glub glub glub!_ —” And he was making the impression of gills with his hands on his cheeks, his teasing relentless, “—except that you don’t really speak fish, just enough that it sounds like gibberish, so they all swim in the opposite direction!”

Thor pushed him away. “That’s a funny story only to you, Loki. But to me, it’s just a lie.”

Loki backed off, crossing his arms. “Hmpth. You’re no good sport, Thor.”

“I am.” Thor returned to studying the hole. “But you tell the worst stories. They’re always so mean.”

“Stories don’t need to be nice to be good stories,” Loki hissed under his breath. Thor caught it anyway.

“Maybe not. But more people listen to nicer stories. Oh! Loki, the line—” And they scrambled simultaneously for the line, which twisted it, and they fought over it and wrestled and hissed that way and the other but in the end they were lying on the iced lake, clutching one half of an enormous flopping trout each.

“I get to cook it,” announced Loki, triumphant.

Away they went, hissing now laughter, breaths trailing behind them while they had forgotten the crushed line beside the hole.

Stephen watched them leave, surprised that the shape of the dream stayed so steady despite their going. Ordinarily, once the scene was over, the undefined lines of memory would seep in and steadily paint the surroundings white or black and it would start all over again in a new slice of dreaming.

“I’m surprised,” a voice beside Stephen entered, and again he wouldn’t have to guess to know whose it was. “You didn’t throw me out of your room.”

“I choose sleep over privacy,” Stephen said. “For the good that does me. At least you aren’t having an all-access bulletin for _my_ dreams, Loki.”

“Hm.” Loki was sitting on the edge of where the lake met the land, the whole place stoked in soft snow. “Where did you grow up, Stephen? As I’ve gotten more familiar with Manhattan and its inhabitants, you strike me as oddly non-native.”

“What? Deep diving for blackmail?”

He felt Loki’s stare, and sighed. “I was born on a farm in Nebraska. Vishanti, it must’ve been before the Second World War.”

“Old, for a mortal.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still younger than Captain America.”

They both laughed.

“You won’t show me?” Loki sounded, of all things, genuinely curious. “Your farm.”

Stephen was incredulous. “No. I don’t show it even to myself and haven’t for I don’t know how long. It’s—my father, okay? My father always insisted I get mine in life, that we all had to get ours. So I became a doctor, because I was smart, and too smart to exploit people as some businessman so I exploited them with their lives. Best neurosurgeon in the country, top five in the entire world. Highest prices. And they paid it, or they got the door.”

“You really are a doctor.” Loki’s head lolled back. “Here I thought it was some play on words, as you humans so love to do. ‘Miracle Man’. ‘Captain America’. ‘Ant Man’. ‘Iron Man’…” He was thoughtful. “So many ‘Men’…”

“We weren’t ever known for our ingenuity in the naming department,” Stephen confessed. “I at least got out using my own damn name and my own damn title, PhD and all.”

“Wasn’t there a time where you hid behind the alias Stephen Sanders? Am I remembering that correctly?”

“God, no. Are you insane?”

(Loki was actually quite right, but Stephen didn’t need the reminder now, or ever.)

They sat there for a while.

“Loki, could you at least make your dream even a tiny bit less cold? My ass is freezing and I’m not even in my physical body.”

Loki snapped his fingers, and Stephen’s ass became not as much an impression of a popsicle. Praise Oshtur.

“So, the restaurant.”

“I am not calling it a date.”

“I know that. Neither am I, Stephen, remember? The restaurant’s owner has the Norn Stone. If I read the vision correctly, he’s a demon named Rafael.”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “Another demon. Sweetness.”

“You _are_ Master of the Mystic Arts. Demons are rather much your, ah, wheelhouse, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Still not going to get used to you using that kind of euphemism, and still not going to be happy about the apparent demon infestation in Manhattan. Vegas was bad enough. Does this kid realize how brutally ironic that an actual demon is hiding out in Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Mephisto’s forgotten must think that hiding where it’d be most obvious is a stronger disguise,” Loki said. “I can see the line of thought. I’ve hidden in Asgard many an occasion for a similar purpose.”

“Your brother ever catch on?”

Loki was smiling. “Only after the tenth or so time. I consider that appreciable mileage.”

Stephen half-smiled, too. “Suppose it is. This dream, though? How long ago was this?”

“Long enough,” said Loki. “Even now I hated him.”

“What?”

“Oh, I loved him. I loved him as much as he loved me, and he loved me dearly. But he was, ultimately, the effigy of everything I wouldn’t achieve. Strength. Blood purity. Honor. Kindness… I don’t need to say the entire list, do I?”

“No.” Stephen stood up, and Loki followed after.

“Ultimately,” Loki repeated, “Brotherly love between a god and a god who was a frost giant was never to be.”

 

* * *

 

At a similar moment, in the land of the living circa Sanctum Sanctorum.

“They’re actually sleeping together.” Zelma was stunned. “In the same bed. And it’s not like it’s the only bed. It’s the same bed and they could be sleeping in other ones.”

“Wow.” Bats phased through the wall. “You weren’t kiddin’. Hey, if Loki’s sleeping, who’s making us breakfast? I was gettin’ used to his bacon.”

“Oh, crap.” Zelma hung her hand, slipping through to the hallway. “Now we have to eat from the refrigerator, Bats.”

“The fridge of unholy horrors?”

“The fridge of unholy horrors. Come on. I’ll have to kill one with the cast iron.”


	12. Diversions

For those keeping score at home?

It was, in fact, a date.

This was not:

Worlds away, an embankment of the cosmos between them and us, someone knelt in front of the massive, glowing silhouette of their God, their King, their Creator. Except the Creator’s silhouette no longer glowed. It no longer hummed. It lied there, cold and motionless, where every turn of its great, horned head or its room-wide, playing field-long tail excised a sigh of pain not unlike a minor earthquake. In our words, they were a dragon. In theirs, they were dying.

The someone spoke—

“Tell us. Tell us how to fix this. You have not told us. We weep for you.”

A rumble. “It is not fixable.” Their voice carried a sorrow heavy enough to gust together a downpour. “It won’t ever.”

“Then tell us why,” the someone cried. “Tell us why!”

“The betrayer,” their dying God of Everything said, “The betrayer did this to me.”

“He lives. The betrayer. I will kill him. You will be avenged.”

The creature considered this, and then said, “No. Do not kill him. Bring him to me. The betrayer.”

“I must,” the someone nodded their head, reverent. “I must. I will. For you.”

“Bring him to me,” the ancient repeated.

_Bring him to me._ And in its wizened palm, between the clutches of golden claws that had not shined for hundreds of years, it revealed a shining, prismatic stone.

“Loki Laufeyson.”

Elsewhere still (now known as Paradise, which was no Paradise of ours)—

“Why do you tell me this, One? Keep your voice down. If Four hears—”

“—I don’t care if Four hears, Two! Do you not understand where I am coming from?”

“I understand it was in your nature to take on human ideals quicker than any of us. That’s why you revealed yourself instead of me or Three or Four.”

“That’s not what I was asking.”

“Your original question is of little interest to me. It is a nebulous concept that cannot be proven in any useful, measured way. It is, to my vocabulary, superstition.”

“We are creatures of science and magic and you come to me bemoaning superstition.” A sigh. “You’re my closest sibling, Two.”

Seconds of silence.

“Have a soul.”

 

* * *

 

 

There and back again, at the Sanctum Sanctorum. A little past five in the evening.

“Loki?”

“Yes?”

“How long did you know you were—pardon the phrasing, both?”

Laughing. You can guess who it belonged to.

“Stephen Strange, are you asking when I knew I was both male and female? Please, do get rid of that face. You look like an embarrassed whelp. Or a crushing schoolboy.”

“I told you, Loki. I’m older than I look. In my day, what you are… weren’t exactly…”

“Accepted? Believe it or not, your realm doesn’t run a monopoly on bigotry.” She was zipping on her dress—more modest than Paris, but that was no high bar to pass. “But yes, I knew even in my earliest days. Although Thor was the first to know, I must’ve held _that_ particular detail in for at least a century. He found out by accident, actually, if my recall isn’t completely shot anymore. I was bathing in a hot spring as a woman and well…” She shook her head, grinning. “His face when he realized who I was shall be burned into my memory for all time.”

“You nude flashed your brother in a hot spring,” Stephen clarified, deadpan.

“Trust me, I was screaming as loud as he. I made him swear in five tongues including Giant which he had learned only from me not to say a word to anyone or I would personally see to his upending agony for a thousand years. Only when he was certain I had put something on and he had put something on would he open his eyes. He did, at least, admit that he thought I was very pretty.”

“Your family seems to have adjusted now. Brother-sister, and everything.”

Loki slipped on high heels. Stephen refused to take a tie. (This was Hell’s Kitchen, even if the restaurant could mash imaginary French together and have an actually clean interior. A three piece in _Paris_ was tiresome enough.)

“They know that Loki is Loki, no matter what form Loki should wear.” She put out a hand for him to take. “Whether you like it or not.”

“We don’t,” Stephen said, using her to pull himself up from the bed. “Trust _me_ on that.”

“Please.” She led him along. “You would not have put nearly as many boots to the ground as fast as you did with the Final Host if it wasn’t my handsome persons at the front of them. Gods, you would have tried parley first, then perhaps deporting them to another planet to raze, or some other such nonsense and by then Midgard would be a smoldering husk. I saved you all by being the familiar face to signal you to punch.”

“Yeah,” agreed Stephen, “You’re right for that, at least. You _do_ have a very, very punchable face, Loki.”

_Huff!_

Further into the Sanctorum, a voice bellowed, “ _ **DOCTOR STRANGE, WHY DO YOU INSIST ON ORGANIZING YOUR BOOKS LIKE THIS?! YOU CAVEMAN!**_ ”

They could take stock that Zelma had her hands full well into the night to be tagging along.

La Townsen—

It was about when they strolled up arm in arm to the restaurant that Stephen realized this was, in fact, a date. Not because of the arm locking, mind, or even coming looking as though they were already a mint, mind, but because he remembered he hadn’t shooed Loki off from ever sleeping next to him again. It had, one hundred percent totally and completely, never crossed his mind once they woke up. Not once. And instead of thinking to curse (for which Stephen had curses aplenty that he hadn’t evoked yet), or wonder how he got here, or why the Vishanti were so concerned with punishing him, Stephen Strange thought this and this only:

_Maybe I should have brought the tie._

He nudged her on the shoulder, catching her attention. “You love your plans. Which one is this?”

“We threaten him, of course. I can’t imagine a demon would take to having to serve the Sorcerer Supreme and the God of Mischief dinner lightly. He might not even know what he has. With luck, sheer intimidation will suffice and we’ll never have to come to blows.”

“Wait, Rafael is a chef?”

“Naturally. Head chef. And from my vision, armed with quite the convincing Italian accent.”

“Great.” They headed right on in.

There’s glitz, glamor, and then there’s the two-ton blinding sparkle which greeted them once the doors opened. To put it politely, Stephen _hated it_. Loki, on the other hand, appeared at once unbothered by the whole thing, and the attendant cheerily addressed them and she just as cheerily addressed back for a table for two, hopefully in the center of this, as she put it, esteemed establishment. He felt the same dragging sensation of a husband having been brought to the mall so he might sit outside of every store and wish on death for an hour and a half each.

“Why the sadness? I can enchant the food so you can eat it, Stephen.”

“Good luck with that, Loki. I’m ordering spiced bourbon and just that. A bottle of it. Maybe two.”

Hmpth. She pulled her menu up half-past her face. “I hear the salmon is killer.”

“This is reminding me far too much of when I was a surgeon,” Stephen admitted. “The dance parties. The restaurants. All those women who were obsessed with me only for the money I was making. Gaggles and gaggles of cling-ons and nothing substantial to be found. One of them even suggested to suck on me for a nose job.”

Loki quirked a brow. Stephen grimaced. “No, I didn’t say yes. I’m not that kind of dog, Loki. Not even then.”

“Well,” she said, “If it’s worth anything to you, I’m not interested in you for the money.”

Stephen’s mouth opened to throw it back, but then the shock hit him— _she said she was interested in me. Loki. The God of Mischief. A deity. And also, a cosmic sized, omega level pain in the…_

“You did not say that.” Pause. “Waitress! My bourbon!”

Loki said something, but Stephen wasn’t listening to her until he could whet his lips with the bottle as he promised. This was what he did catch:

“—for how long do you expect to keep up this dance, Strange?”

And he drank three more gulps.

Loki was shaking her head, asking for the salmon special and only a glass of bubbling champagne. She waved off the waitress and turned back to Stephen, looking far more annoyed than amused.

“It’s not as though I grounded myself on Midgard for you, Stephen. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that. I am here for a purpose, and you are keeping me for that purpose. Thor knows it, the Avengers know it. There are Nine Realms besides this one and there is a cataclysmic event that, for the first time in maybe millennia, doesn’t have my name on it heading towards them. And the rumblings of much smaller destructive events come flanked beside it, as with the entities holding Wong hostage and the crisis for the Norn Stones.”

“Why are you telling me what I already know, Loki?”

She stared him down.

“Because I’m not interested in you for some ploy to take over the world, Strange.”

There was some silence after that.

You want to believe her, Stephen Strange.

The last time you thought she was taking over the world using your good name was a misunderstanding, Stephen Strange.

You can argue her methods but what she did with the Final Host could have been oh-so-much worse, Stephen Strange.

Your jaw is tight, Stephen Strange.

Clea was so long ago even if you think it wasn’t, Stephen Strange.

Choose now or choose never, Stephen Strange.

He did. We all did.

And when his jaw finally spread open: “How is this going to work?”

“I don’t know.” She slipped out a fork for her salmon.

“You can’t hit me with the _I don’t know_ , Loki. You’re you. You’re always thinking up to something. You can’t honestly tell me you of all people don’t have a clue in this.”

“It’s been so long since I was interested in anyone,” she told him, and Stephen knew just by the glint in her eyes that she was telling the truth. “And no-one quite like you.”

“Quite like me? Start from somewhere. What do you mean by that?”

“Well, for one, a sorcerer. A functional alcoholic”—her fork pointed at the bourbon—“and… and an equal.”

“An equal.” If that wasn’t what he expected to hear the least. “We are not equals, Loki. You’re a god. I’m Atlas holding up my world from every threat ranging from Dormmamu to black market goblins.”

“We aren’t equals in power, no. But you pay your tab, and I pay mine. And, for the record, Stephen? You must be very strong to be Atlas.”

“A compliment,” Stephen said, weighing it with a nod of his head. “I’ve been complimented by the Liar to End All Liars.”

“My hope is that when I’m honest, you listen.” Loki took a bite. “Am I wrong?”

Stephen considered another hit on the bottle, but left it aside. “Surreal. This is surreal. You understand what this is like for me, right? I get divorced by Clea. She lives in the Dark Dimension, being greater than me in every way. A Faltine. My better. Sure, every now and again she comes down to Earth, and it’s mostly to scold me for being how I am. Gods, she’s the only reason I picked up shaving again. Magic died. I’m the gardener for what’s growing up past the ashes. You come—and I lose everything all over again. Wong, Zelma, everything. I get my ten minutes as the God of Magic just to realize I was being overbearing with you and nearly got a punch of death from Bob. The Avengers ring me up. And now…” He suddenly saw her, furrowing his brows. “Loki, why are you laughing?”

“I never thought it could happen.” She giggled, unable to hide it. “You monologuing like me.”

His first instinct was to yell. This was his second: “Yeah, I suppose I did, uh, come a bit unglued, there. I haven’t really… articulated it to anyone. Not even to Wong. Or Stark.”

“Empowering, isn’t it?”

“Loki, you will never convince me to monologue on the regular. I swear, if I recorded the sort of things you say and play it back to you, you would be mortified.”

“But it felt good.”

_Sigh._

“Yes, it felt good.”

She clapped her hands, then took another bite out of her salmon. “Point one for Laufeyson.”

Stephen froze. “Wait, we were keeping score?”

“Always keep score, Stephen.”

_Fuck._

“I really do hate you, Loki.”

She smirked. “Do you?”

“Physically and spiritually.”

“That’s a shame. Here I had thought we were dating.”

“Listen,” Stephen was saying, no longer resisting the allure of the bottle, “Even if that were true, you don’t strike me as the dating type. More the, ‘ _I’m your personal—_ ’”

“—Pain in the arse?”

Poured one out, and then two. “Personal pain in the ass.”

“Well, aren’t I already?”

“I believe I have gone at length about how you make me feel discomfort in the general lower area, yes.”

Neither of them could stop each other from the laughter, or the clinking of glasses toast.

If you told Stephen he’d be laughing right there with the God of Mischief months, not even, a few weeks ago, stuck in some glitzy wasteland of a restaurant whose head chef was a literal devil in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen on the hunt for magical wishing stones so they could save Wong while outside forces soldiered on to claim the heads of the rest of the Nine Realms, he wouldn’t believe you if he was knock out drunk. Neither would Loki. He’d say stop dreaming. Or keep writing that fanfiction.

But as they say, there are certain things you just can’t make up.

“For the record,” Stephen said, clutching his shot glass, “I think Thor understated it way back when, when he called you ‘very pretty’. You’re a—you’re a knockout, Loki. At least as a woman. I don’t know why you strive for the unwashed goblin with a mop on his head aesthetic as a man.”

“Contrast,” Loki replied keenly. “And you’ve had plenty to drink, Sorcerer Supreme.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had tainted blood on the job. I’ll be fine.”

Beat.

“You are a knockout,” Stephen repeated. “I could die fulfilled and happy between those valleys—”

“—Let’s save the sweet talk for later, Stephen.”

“Why? World ending right now?”

“Look to your right.”

He didn’t have to look to hear the second bellow of the evening:

“ _ **I’M GONNA BE SPITTIN’ HELLFIRE AND BRIMSTONE UNLESS SOMEONE TELLS ME WHY I JUST SERVED THAT LARK SORCERER SUPREME A DAMN DINNER!**_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took twelve chapters, but they've finally got this far, lads. I'll drink to that. And for when everything goes to shit next chapter and beyond.


	13. Complications, Italian Style

Doctor Strange had a little too much to drink, alright. But where there’s a demon hollering something bloody to the right of him, throwing infernal-tongue curses this way and that-a-way, there’s a Master of the Mystic Arts raring to play exorcist. At least, if said demon wasn’t a line of devils, for each either tall, short, fat, thin, or hulking, completed by puffy chef’s hats and rotten accents.

That’s when it hit him.

Rafael wasn’t a head chef.

He was _five._

There wasn’t a bottle of bourbon deep enough to cure what Stephen was feeling. He wanted to scream, maybe louder than the Rafaels were screaming at him, or yell at Loki for lying to him, or outright start to sob (he was that kind of drunk), but he couldn’t do any of that, there just wasn’t the space, let alone the time. So he shot up straight in his seat, noticing how the outside would beyond him and Loki grew duller and duller, further out of focus—her magic, no doubt, which precluded any bystanders getting stuck in the crossfire, unlike Paris—then put on his best stoic, ‘ _I am the enloved but feared Sorcerer Supreme_ ’ posture attire and waited for the inevitable.

“Please, not so loud,” said Loki, chastising the whole lot, “I’m not finished with my salmon yet.”

“And the fuckin’ God of Mischief. You’re a fuckin’ hack, Strange. Why the hell did you think you could show face in my damn restaurant?” One of the Rafaels demanded, the thin reedy one, whose cheeks were redder than apples and his accent toeing more Irish than anything.

“You have something we need,” Stephen said, trying to push the shot glasses out of view. “Norn Stones ring a bell for you, Rafael?”

The shorter, stubbier Rafael crowed. “Oh, it’s gonna be about that.” His accent was Greek. “Yeah, I got me a Norn Stone.” Now it was Cockney, second to the left and looking though he might be a less impressive Red Hulk. “What’s it to you?”

“As I said, we need it. Might you give it up quietly?”

“What?” The Rafaels eyed them both. “Got a _date_ to be gettin’ to? That liquor bill is gonna hurt your wallet something fierce, Strange. Some taste you got. Her rack even real?”

“As real as your cries of agony should we tip Mephisto what you’ve been up to, Rafael,” Loki shot back, twirling her champagne glass. _Sip._ “I have neglected to play billiards with him in a while. Certain things just come up while chewing the fat, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

And then, as if on cue, each of the five Rafaels thundered with not fear, or begging, or anything of the sort—they belted out shuddering, whole-room shaking laughter.

As for Stephen and Loki, they were glancing between each other, wondering if, maybe, they’d all gone insane.

“Oh! Oh! My mother’s bosom, that’s a good one!” Cockney-Rafael said, holding his belly up as it continued to roll with his howling, tears sizzling against infernal skin. “Sure, sure, I’m so scared of Mephisto. You think I don’t know Mephisto is currently getting a run for his money by ol’ Vinktar, curse his name and stature? You think us forgotten don’t keep up with the news back home? What am I, an idiot like either of you?”

And now Stephen was staring right for Loki, who tried to deflect it with a small smile but got belied by weariness beside her eyes. He need not say it to show it: _I told you so._

Because it’d be _too easy_ for any plan of Loki’s to not come back and bite them, now wouldn’t it?

“Name your price,” Loki told him, tone knowingly flat. “We want it, you have it. I don’t doubt it’s not critical to running the establishment here, Rafael. You can afford to see it go, can’t you? It’s only going to bring more uninvited visitors such as ourselves as time ever marches on. Undue attention that could see running your business becoming far more complicated than you would like. We offer you parley. Consider it a truce between you, the demon, and me, the one thought of as a demon. What say you?”

“You Norse gods are all hacks, each and the last of ‘ya,” short, Greek-Rafael spat.

But the five of them went inward, whispering to one another, and Loki’s smile pulled up, genuine now, sure that her oft-mentioned silver tongue had done its dues. He was by no means a minor demon (or a singular entity, as Stephen got to realize first-hand), but demons were creatures of talk and contracts and of words with double meanings. It was the whole reason her old self got on so well with Mephisto. Certainly, he’d see things her way, name a price they could pay, and on their merry way they’d go. Stephen would no doubt deal with exorcising him back to Hell at a later date, when the ax hanging over Wong was solved.

The Rafaels separated. Loki beamed, waiting for her victory. Stephen wanted it too, so that they might go home and him nurse the coming hangover.

“Mi price,” said the Italian, center Rafael, “Is that we get to run a train on her. All five.”

And lo, hope for a bloodless resolution, how quickly you exit stage left.

As it happens, you can be a five-in-one licentious, perverted demonic package deal, but the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak would not be as dreaded as they are if they cared a whit about such details. They latch on. They burn. They sap you of everything you are, was, and might be. They could snap a regular mortal’s bones in half if you so much as twitched inappropriately. The Rafaels looked then as though they might be a captured rogue’s gallery straight from the panels of Scooby-Doo, wriggling, hissing, suspended in air and spitting verbal brimstone if their lives depended on it.

“The stone.” Stephen instructed, carefully so they wouldn’t misconstrue or underestimate just how hot with fury he was. “ _Where is it?_ ”

“Come on,” the Cockney one muttered, “Like you wouldn’t do it too—”

The Crimson Bands pulled ever tighter. Each of them whimpered like dogs.

“I am only going to repeat myself once.” Stephen was but inches away from the face of the Rafael center to them all. “The stone. Where is it?”

“What you gonna do if we don’t fess?”

“I’ll ship you back to Mephisto in chunks after I’ve scried the location from your **bones.** ”

“Jus’ do it,” the Irish Rafael cried. “I’m not to die like this! I’m a chef! We’re a chef! We’re not the big leagues no more!”

“Fine!” The center Rafael acquiesced. “It’s in the back room, where I keep the ingredients, you know. Bit of palette tossing here and there, then a creaky board under. You pull it back, it’s there. I swear it! I swear it on note of my cursed birth! Just leave us alone!”

The Bands coalesced into nothing, dropping the gaggle of devils on top of themselves, who scattered as would ants from a wasp. Stephen floated down to the ground, the Cloak of Levitation nipping his neck, and sighed. Loki was beside him, having been apparently content to let him do the punishing she herself would have done had he not beat her to the punch.

“Hmm.” She watched them scramble back into the kitchen one by one. As the world around them sharpened back into view, the restaurant-goers knew nothing save for maybe overhearing the occasional fiery-tinted sniffle coming from behind the kitchen double-doors. “If I may?”

“What now?” Stephen kneaded his forehead under his hands, unsure of anything that’d happened in the last two hours. Naturally, the gravity of everything decided now was the perfect opportunity to emotionally clothesline him.

He felt her pull him in to a cheek kiss. “You’re far more attractive when you’re seething with rage.”

“Don’t encourage me. I’ve had one too many drinks. I promise… I’m measured when I’m sober.”

“Sure you are.” She lead him on to the back room, and as the Rafaels promised, a prismatic, rainbow-colored stone soon greeted them, poorly hidden between some hay beneath the flaky floorboard. Loki stowed it away in some immaterial pocket of hers, to Stephen’s chagrin that she had, apparently, anointed herself the new Frodo to the Stones’ One Ring. He was too frock with alcohol to argue the case right now.

After they left, as La Townsen closed for the night:

“I can’t believe we got showed up by that hack Sorcerer Supreme. You know how many times he lost his title over the years? You think he’d be playing hot potato with the damn thing! And now he’s being all kitschy lovey-dovey to the last person who stole it from him!”

“Whatever. Just hope he leaves us alone. Mephisto might be busy, but we weren’t made to be cooking in Hell.”

The gaggle of Rafaels were plodding through dismal Manhattan streets, on the way to their house up on the hill. A shadow came into being in front of them, speaking in a language none of them recognize. Masked. Bipedal. From the way they sounded, demanding.

“Uh.”

“Um.”

“Who the fuck is this guy?”

And those were the last words any Rafael spoke now, or ever.

 

* * *

 

 

“I finally tamed the atrocity you call a book-shelving system, Stephen. How did you let it go so quickly after I left the first time?”

“Thank you, Zelma. I’m drunk. Can we have a conversation about this in the morning?”

Zelma sighed. “Sure. But if you forget about it when you’re dangling an ice-pack to your head and bemoaning your lack of self control in the presence of attractive women, I’m coming for the jugular.”

“We recovered the Norn Stone,” said Loki, holding Stephen up by the shoulder. It was hard to not think of him as a lightweight—but then, when your adventures in alcohol are postmarked by days of honey mead and gods drinking other gods under the table (herself included, as Loki did as Loki does), she was sure to be biased. “There’s three left, to my estimate.”

“Uh-huh. That’s good. We have three weeks anyway until the alien wants to kill Wong, so there’s time. Uh…”

She blinked, pointing a finger. “Are you two—?”

“We refused to call it a date,” Loki answered.

“Thank the Vishanti,” murmured Stephen.

“But…” Loki grinned. “I do believe we entered a pact to be each other’s personal pain in the arse.”

“Oh, wow.” She seemed taken with the idea. “Is that like, what being a couple is like between you gods? Just bothering the crap out of each other?” Zelma swung around as Loki passed, Stephen in tow. “No flowers? No ‘I love yous’?”

Loki simply winked behind her, saying, “That’s what it’s like should your name be Loki.”

“Ah. Okay.” She wrung her hands, facing Bats. “Suppose I should’ve guessed that.”

“Does this mean bacon every day?” asked Bats.

“I think so,” Zelma said.

“Well, that’s a mint. Too bad about the Doc, though. I gotta bad feeling, like Loki’s gonna eat him alive.”

“Me too, Bats. Me too. But if she does, it’s partly my fault.”

“Why’s that?”

“I kind of… encouraged him.”

“Oh, no.”

 

* * *

 

 

An indistinct passage of time. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps half an hour, or longer, but the surety is that our environment is now Sanctorum much smaller, just Stephen’s bedroom. The rest have fallen away, and the mutterings of outside forces have quiet even if for a fleeting moment. In this bedroom, there are only three things:

One drunk but not totally pissed out drunk Sorcerer Supreme,

One completely cognizant and very much female God of Mischief,

And their bed which as early as yesterday was not their bed.

The players. The piece. And this was what was happening:

“You know,” Stephen said, lying a little askew from the headboard, “When you first came here. That morning I was worried you had seduced me. I checked for my boxers and everything, like I was some hormonal teenager. It’d been that long since I encountered a woman that got my attention.”

Loki shook her head, unable to hide her smile. “Stephen, I’m the God of Mischief, not a succubus. Besides, if _that_ were my intent, surely you’d see the signs by now. I’m subtle, but you know my subtle.”

Beat.

“I’m not wearing my boxers right now, am I?”

“Not at all.”

Another beat.

“We’re actually doing this.”

“It would seem so, yes. Would you prefer I leave it to tomorrow, when you’ve sobered?”

“By Hoggoth, no. Are you insane? My headache’s going to make a mince out of me by then. I’m not _that_ drunk, Loki.”

“I can help you sleep soundly,” she was saying, having slid herself on top of him. “You need only give me the word.”

“Okay, now you sound like a succubus,” Stephen said, and they shared a laugh. “But…”

“But?”

He kissed her on the neck. “My word is yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will admit, for as much fun as I had writing him, Rafael will be missed. Also, ambiguous sex scene in MY slow burn work? More likely than you think!


	14. Complications, Extraterrestrial Style

_My word is yes._

Such it happens that lying with the God of Mischief would translate to rather the slurry of passionate memories for one Sorcerer Supreme whenever he thinks of that night. (We assure you, it’s thought of often. Maybe more than it ought to be. But therein lies the rub, no? After taking so many hits one after the other, between the Imperator, Dormmamu, magic itself dying and being reborn—you cling to whichever brings you the least bit of respite in a vice grip. So far, he’s never reasoned to let it go lest a sliver of happiness slip through his fingers unwarranted.) From our aforementioned three important things, here is what Stephen cherishes the most:

The feeling of her hips in his hands,

The way they kissed and laughed in equal part,

And the hope he harbored that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t the worst decision he’s ever made.

A jury deliberating the latter, of course, would have endured several days’ worth of arguing.

How couldn’t they? A union between a trickster god and Earth’s sworn mystical protector? What would SHIELD say? What would the Avengers say? It wasn’t too hard to imagine; Cap telling him to keep his head above water, Thor threatening his almighty hammer, Stark siding with them through saying nothing at all. Loki was on some wayward path to what she knew not to be redemption but something like it, sure, but she was by no means trusted. Not in the least. Loki was Loki. That was the most immutable detail about her—Loki could be anything, but she would be Loki, and that meant her loyalties were as solid as liquid. Here she was, in his house, they’re wearing nothing, on one another, kissing, rubbing. The god that invented being a turncoat. The Master of the Mystic Arts.

And you know what?

Stephen Strange did not give a damn.

When he looks back on that night, he doesn’t care that it happened, or how, or why, or what the fallout became. What interests him, he figures, interests her too—the fact that in even that first night the wordless agreement was already fixed, abolishing a word from both their minds. The word in question? Four letters. Even starts with an L.

It was not Loki.

It was _love._

Not once had she phrased it that way. Not once did he. Loki described it as an interest; Stephen an invited complication. Its absence would surely be noted over and over again by outsiders looking in, but for the two players of this particular dance, it ought as well never existed. It didn’t need to, further, it wasn’t so much as wanted. For them, the acknowledgment of love in any of its many faces might as well been a kiss of death. Love in Stephen’s ears meant a woman dimensions away who no longer held it for him. Love in Loki’s meant a brother who cared no matter the centuries and centuries of schemes to make her undeserving.

So, they were there. Together. And they left that accursed word at the door.

After:

“I’m surprised you’re still awake,” and it was Loki who said this. “Was I too rough?”

Stephen glanced her way. “You’d have to be tougher on me than that.”

 _Hmpth._ She smirked. “I wanted to be gentler than usual, what with your alcohol-related troubles…”

“I told you, Loki, I’m not _that_ drunk. Takes more than a tall bottle of bourbon to knock me sideways.”

“Is that so?” She lied back on him now, watching him with those piercing emeralds she called her eyes. The type that could see straight through you if they so willed. For now, he met them as moonlight twinkled just outside. “Do you—”

“—want to test that with a second round?”

Loki simply tilted her head.

He shook his. “You’re forgetting that above everything else, I’m still a mortal, Loki.” A hand went through her hair, and Stephen smiled despite what he was saying. “Not that I wouldn’t want to match your oh-so-divine libido if I could.”

Faking a pout, she slipped off him, curling up close to his chest. “Shame. I would have liked to see what you would do with me as a man.”

“Tomorrow,” Stephen said. “I’m sure you can keep it together that long.”

“I’ve dealt with worse,” Loki agreed. “Such as having to see you bend over in those lamentable tights.”

“Ease off the tights. You think I don’t wince when you walk around in leather pants that tight? The belts are purely for decoration!”

“Aye.” Loki planted a kiss on his cheek. “But then, irony is a favorite of mine. Especially of the flustering variety.”

“Hnh.” Stephen put one on her to match. “I’ve only one question.”

“And I’ve only one answer.”

“Just tell me… am I going to have to fear you shapechanging into some unholy scaled abomination during?”

Loki grinned with each and every of her pearly, misbegotten teeth. “Only in your dreams, Stephen.”

He stared off. “Goodie.”

“But, if you ask poli—”

“Asleep, Loki. I’m asleep.”

There was more of that miraculous-which-was-not-miraculous dreaming, although none of it bequeathed Asgard. It did, however, provide Stephen the wonder of whether or not the gods ever did quite dream insomuch roam their own mindscapes and memories supplanted by the occasional vision or Ragnarok-tinted nightmare. Maybe Loki was unique in this regard. It wouldn’t surprise him. He couldn’t imagine Thor dreaming about much beside putting hammer to the jaws of giants and wrestling boars twice the size of men. (And of mead. A whole dragon’s hoard of mead…) Stephen didn’t expect an easy answer to his wondering should he have ever found one. If the gods were good for anything, and if Loki’s pantheon of gods were good for anything, it was being vague to the point of tears.

At least, wandering along with her in her mind meant that she wasn’t about to leave whilst they slept. That was the nicest gift of them all.

Morning rose.

Stephen, unsurprisingly, was second to wake and, as prophesied, he was woken up more for the migraine pounding at his skull than for anything remotely sweet. He staggered to a stand and called for the Cloak of Levitation to bring him something from the medicine cabinet. Not even the occult’s mightiest could resist the tender embrace of a good Advil and a glass of water. He half walked, half stumbled into the nearest bathroom to shave himself before his growing beard had anymore opportunities to run his self-esteem ragged. It was here, viewing himself in the mirror, that he realized that this was so far an ordinary morning of a so far ordinary day, hangover and everything.

He slept with Loki. The world tilted the tiniest bit further off its axis. And yet, it kept spinning.

Stephen made a face. “ _Fuck._ ”

There was no longer any denying it— _This is real._

“What am I going to say to them?” He asked, to which his scruffy mug for a reflection supplied nothing save for a roll of it eyes. “I can’t just lie. I’m lying enough with Thor. Covering for Loki with the Norn Stones… it’s gonna come back and bite us, I know it. Accursed trickster can’t ever let me come _clean_ for once.” He picked up his razor. “How would you even put it? ‘Hey, I know I was to be the quote en quote warden for the God of Mischief. It was an alright job. But I decided to throw caution to the wind and let impulse guide me such that I’m now sharing a bed with her. Yeah, I know, _whoops._ ’ Hill would eat me alive, kill me, then bring me back to life to eat me alive again.”

His marginally less scruffy mug continued to stare at him, and say nothing. Better luck having a deep conversation with his damn Cloak.

“Not to mention Thor. ‘Oh, yeah, we infiltrated Asgardia to steal a book so we could find the rest of the Norn Stones. Don’t worry about it. No destruction of property involved, unless you count your pride.’ These jowls of mine aren’t made to be eating Uru-fitted hammers.” Stephen slid the razor down the other side of his face. “Plus, I get involved with her, I get involved with them. I’m never going to escape having to play mediator with these gods at this rate. Olympus would be less trying on patience…”

But Olympus doesn’t have sorcerous tricksters that can become one of the hottest women Stephen’s ever known at the flick of a switch. (And despite his insistence on the heel dragging, her male form wasn’t that much of a sight for sore eyes, either.) Go figure.

“I suppose I’ve got nothing to do but lie in the bed I’ve made.” His reflection nodded solemnly. “As I always have. At least Karl hasn’t shown his face around in a while. Gods, if I had to deal with him, too. I—”

 _Wait a second._ There was another face in the mirror. Stephen froze as a statue, razor hitting the floor with a too-mild _tang._

“And this is my problem, Doctor,” said One, clutching an open hole where a heart should be, “I’ve got no soul.”

Then the Sanctum Sanctorum was wizard minus one.

 

* * *

 

 

“Please, Zelma, do contain your inalienable appetite. What is Stephen going to eat when he comes down? Nary but the atoms you leave behind?”

“Um. You can just make more, right?”

“Using magic to cook defeats the magic in cooking, Zelma.” Loki was incredulous. “But yes, I could, if I must. Do not make me _must._ ”

“You threatenin’ the good woman, Loki? I’ll bite ‘cha.”

“Not threatening, Bats. Besides, you’re a ghost.”

“Would still hurt,” said Bats. “Only less, uh, physically, I’d figure.”

Loki served another omelet for himself, noticing almost as soon as he sat down that something was wrong in the air, and neither Zelma, her appetite, or Bats were responsible for the oddity. It was as though the house itself felt lighter, less contained, the same sort of wild tinge to the atmosphere that he remembered for when he was Sorcerer Supreme, when Stephen was nowhere to be found except for a veterinary clinic miles and miles away.

“Zelma,” asked Loki, “Is Stephen to be out today?”

“Not that I know of,” she said, still munching away at her own food. “Why do you ask?”

“A terrible feeling.”

A terrible feeling, not unlike, perchance, a massive explosion that rocked them all to the ground—but then, that was no feeling.

Zelma and Loki coughed, the latter peeling himself from where he’d been thrown. “What in the name of Hel—”

A voice oscillated over him, deep with seething anger:

“I have found you, Betrayer.”

And the game was on.

Zelma remembers what it was like. It started with a thunderclap in her ears. The blaring, all-consuming ringing that followed after, then the way her vision swam as she could only sit, and crawl, trying whatsoever she could to look for what had happened. Splinters then whole jets of the floorboards had been sprung this way and the other, and it was only by chance that none hit her. Two voices yelling, screaming, one of which she knew and the other she did not. She squinted, managed to put fingers to her head, and was astonished when she felt blood. Then light around her was growing dimmer. Although Zelma opened her mouth to say something, anything, nothing left her. She fell back down, and saw darkness.

When she emerged from the abyss that was the brink—

“It’s okay,” someone said. “You’re going to be alright.”

“Wuh…” The sterile white blinded her. “Where am I?”

“An Avengers facility,” they responded, and at once she shot up in her hospital bed. Bad move, and she paid for it with a shriek when the pain hit. She knew that voice. Everyone knew that voice.

“Oh. Oh my god,” Zelma stammered. “I’m talking to Captain America.”

“In the flesh,” Cap responded, smiling, although his expression carried a solemn edge. “Please don’t force yourself. The explosion hit you bad. We came as soon as we got the alert.”

Zelma lowered her head to her pillow. “Okay… what happened?”

“That’s what we’re here to ask you, Miss Zelma Stanton,” another somebody said, and this one was Tony Stark. “The Avengers are investigating the sudden and violent disappearance of Loki and Doctor Strange.”


	15. Falling Apart

“Uh.”

“Um.”

“You’re asking _me_ what happened?”

Suddenly Zelma felt far more anxious than she was in pain. (A possible side effect of having been starstruck—she was, after all, a librarian first and witch second. Waking up to a room occupied by Captain America and Iron Man? Pure fantasy, besides the hospital gauze and how she couldn’t feel her extremities.)

“Well…” Her brows knit. “I guess we’re going to have to start with Wong…”

She couldn’t be sure for how long she told the story, or if she’d missed details between her queasiness. Imagine a checklist where the boxes would move, shift, or disappear entirely when their time came as the hand drew near—that was what it was like, having to give an account of everything until now and really, Zelma didn’t know _everything_ ; she had to minimize those secondhand account idiosyncrasies, from what gender Loki was for a particular event or that they were arguing over her instead of the cleaning when she first came over to the Sanctorum.

Okay, the last one was wishful thinking.

When she was done, she called for a glass of water first and what the Avengers knew second. Before anyone did something about anything, though, Rogers and Stark looked to each other.

Cap: “He lied to us.”

Stark: “He’s sleeping with Loki?”

Then both their heads hung, and they sighed.

Zelma, sipping her water through a straw. “I know, it sounds bad. It is bad, when you think about it. I should have… I don’t know. Stephen, he’s—it’s not the first time we’ve sort of thrown caution to the wind without telling any of you, right? When the Imperator came, he didn’t call the Avengers. That’s how he’s always been. He wants to fix everything on his own. Call it contempt for the mundy…”

“Mundy?” repeated Stark. “The Avengers are _not_ mundy.”

“Who wrote all of the wards to protect your facilities from magical threats?”

She expected his silence.

“Yeah. Thought so. That’s what I mean. You guys are great and all, and I’m still over the moon that Captain America is actually here, right next to me, like wow—but when it comes to us, the witches and the wizards, you don’t have a clue. You phone up Doctor Strange and hope for the best. He’s gotten so used to being the one called that he doesn’t do any of the calling.”

“But he disappeared,” Cap said. “You’re saying he didn’t elope with Loki?”

Zelma couldn’t shrug, but the way she held her eyes substituted as well as they could. “Before the explosion, Loki was… on edge. He asked me if Stephen was to be out today, like he had already sensed something was wrong. Said it was from a ‘terrible feeling’, then well— _boom._ I don’t remember anything after that.”

“Could be a cover up,” Stark observed. “It’s not exactly Loki’s first rodeo. Seduce the Doctor, make off with the Norn Stones, then go for the dramatic exit to tie up loose ends.”

She stared. “Are you suggesting Loki was trying to kill me?”

“Has Loki ever had much of a concern for human life? What he did with the Final Host…”

“Listen, Tony, I ate that stupid god’s _bacon_ after he kissed me because I secretly, totally unknown to me, had a potentially world-ending spell inside my soul as recent as months ago. He was not trying to kill me.”

Cap nudged him on the shoulder. “She called you Tony.”

“Yeah, I know. Real fangirl of yours, Cap. Let’s move on.” Stark’s arms were crossed. “If they didn’t elope, and Loki’s not responsible for the Doctor’s disappearance _or_ his, then… someone kidnapped them?” Pause. “You can kidnap Doctor Strange…?”

“You can kidnap Doctor Strange.” Zelma was deadpan. “He isn’t invincible, no matter what he says. Especially after what happened with Wong… wait.”

_Ah, crap._

“I think… those people that took Wong. They must’ve taken him, too.”

“What for?” asked Stark. “They had already threatened you in Paris. My sensors went haywire after I blacked out. Whoever they are, they’re no small fry. I would almost say Doom if I didn’t know better.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they changed their mind? Or there were less Norn Stones than we were expecting? They’re probably aliens, they’re not supposed to make sense.”

“Jeez.” Stark muttered something under his breath. “Should’ve just hit the alarm that night in Paris. Last time I ever pull out a favor for him.”

“You’re saying they only took the Doctor, Zelma. Where’s Loki?” asked Cap.

“I don’t know that either,” she said, “But wherever he might be, I don’t think it’s pleasant.”

Stark looked at his suit arm, a hologram flashing in his face. He studied it, then waved it down. “Energy readings came back from forensics on the explosion. It’s left residue that can’t be matched to any compound found on Earth, and estimates say it isn’t Kree or Skrull in nature either.”

“This is one long rabbit hole,” said Cap after some consideration. “We might need the whole team to get to the bottom of it. Maria’s not going to be happy with us. What do you think, Tony?”

“I’m going to be less enthusiastic breaking the news to the one holding the magic thunder hammer, Cap.”

They turned back to Zelma.

“I know this situation is as confusing for you as it is us,” Rogers was telling her, “And it’s great to hear that you’re cooperating to the best of your ability, Miss Zelma Stanton. Until the mystery is solved, SHIELD’s going to trust you as executor of his estate. Rest well.”

_Huh,_ Zelma thought, _Out of any way I could’ve inherited the haunted house, reality chooses this one._ Then, _I hope they’re okay._ Finally, _Even if Loki deserves what he gets._

“Hey, before you leave.” She pointed a weak finger at her gauze-covered arm. “Could you autograph my cast?”

 

* * *

 

 

Breaking the news to the one holding the magic thunder hammer went over about as well as Tony expected.

“Okay, Thor,” he yelled over the clatter of rubble. “You got your five minutes of divine tantrum. Come on down before you _level the entire Tower!_ ” _I am so not paying for these damages out of pocket._ “I said—get down from it, you oversized—”

_**KRAAK-THOOM!** _

“Should have told him in Asgard. Let him destroy his own damn castle for once. _Should have._ ” He fired his repulsor rays to push off a steel support beam from collapsing into another rung. “Cap? Any help here, buddy?”

“I’m hedging him toward where the Celestial body meets the rest of the mountain,” Cap reported over the comms. “Hopefully it’ll minimize the rampage.”

“Uh-huh. As long as I don’t see the check on my ledger.” Stark blasted off after Thor.

After what felt to be several hours of herding around a god with serious anger issues—

“He lied.” Thor’s face were in his massive hands. “The sorcerer lied to me.”

“The Doc’s always been a bit tough to understand,” Cap said, patting him on the back. They were at the pinnacle of the mountain, Thor having bored a hole through that SHIELD would reappropriate into another transport line. “He’s on a different wavelength than the average Avenger. It’s everyone’s fault that we didn’t ask enough questions”—He was looking Stark’s way—“before it got this far. I’m sure he believes what he did was the right thing.”

“The right thing? _The right thing?!_ ” Thor looked up, every shade of enraged. “There is no right in this! The Norn Stones belong with Asgard! He should have worked together with myself to find them instead of consorting with that viper I must know as my brother-sister! Now they are both gone! I never should have let Loki stay on Midgard.” He turned away. “Thus the fault lies squarely on I.”

“Chin up, thunder god,” Tony told him. “We’re all in this together now, aren’t we? We’re going to find the Doctor, we’re going to find Loki, and we’re going to make sure those stones get into the right hands. Maria can deliver him one hell of an ass-chewing and you get to decide what to do with your brother-sister. We’re on the clock now. You with us?”

Thor stayed quiet for a few moments, his expression shifting from anger to contempt and even to a color of sadness before he finally stood up, Mjolnir tight in the hand. He was inscrutable then in a way that made Tony equally uncomfortable insomuch assured. You could never tell with the gods of whether they were preparing to do good, or preparing to go to war. As far as Thor was concerned, he was expecting a bit of both.

Tony could work with that. He had something of a bone to pick with Stephen anyway. (Maybe for reminding him too much of himself. Far be it the first time, what with deciding that you were separate from the Avengers on more than one occasion.)

“I stand with the Avengers.” Thunder crackled all around. “We will bring them to justice.”

 

* * *

 

 

_But wherever he might be, I don’t think it’s pleasant._

The past always has a way with catching up to you in the most literal of fashions, don’t they, Loki?

We suppose it can’t be helped. Spend millennia flying under the banner of the God of Evil, and there’s no room to act surprised when there are those that, when broken in your wake, don’t get forgotten under the trappings of your own immortality. Only so many can be whisked away through the sands of time before you start scarring ones that will not only live, but remember. And have the pleasure of waiting. Waiting, and waiting still, until the opportunity reveals itself.

You make your own prices to pay.

He knew who had come for him the instant he heard the word _Betrayer_ spoken in that pseudo-mechanical tone in a tongue that while the Allspeak understood, it had not heard in eras. He knew. He knew, and yet, some part of him would have wanted to come quietly; it would have told him to stand down and brace for the inevitable. But Loki was Loki. Coming quietly was never in his nature then, and it certainly hasn’t found a place now. So they fought. But betrayers rarely win when the debtors come to collect their dues.

“He is awake.”

“You rather tore into him, Operator,” another robotic tone answered. “But, it would appear the same has been done unto you.”

“My rage for the Betrayer has been festering for countless cycles, refined into a point sharper than our greatest blades. What he has done to our God shall never be forgiven. It is a mystery that only He knows for why He asked for him to be brought here instead of killed as the dog he is.”

“Perhaps He would like to see the execution.”

“That is my hope. Open your eyes, Betrayer.”

Loki winced, and coughed while his vision swam with white.

“Welcome home, you filthy dog.”

This was the world that greeted him:

It was dead.

“See what you have done?” A pound hit his shoulder, harsh enough to cause him to lurch forward and taste blood in his throat. “Look fast, Betrayer! This is what you leave behind with your schemes! You must remember the lush forests, the trees, the fauna, the peaceful homes and cities, all united under His guidance? No more! When you betrayed us, you killed us all! And now He is dying too.” Operator knelt to his ear while he dragged him through the empty paths and the dry pits of smoky ash. “My wish is for Him to tell me to rip your heart out to avenge my fallen brothers, Betrayer. May you never see the sun again.”

There were worse things than watching the dying, Loki realized. It was seeing the aftermath. There was only one building that stood among the dessicated rubble, whose facade he hadn’t seen for centuries but remembered as simply as his mother’s face. Here lived the God of Everything. Here lived another piece of Loki’s history, no matter what he did to burn it with the remains of who he once was. The great, spiral-esque double doors opened, and he was thrown inside with no more ceremony but a kick to the legs.

“I see you for the first time in centuries, Betrayer,” rasped the earthly voice of a dragon once prismatic. “Come closer. I wish to tell you the tale of how you ruined me.”

 

* * *

 

 

Paradise-adjacent.

“You… you don’t have a soul? But every living being—”

“Me and my siblings were born of magic and forged in science, Doctor. Once we were nothing, a pit of darkness. Then we were not, and we were like you. Taking on human shapes. Working ourselves into saying human words. But different. Always different, Doctor, and now I know why.”

“I don’t understand. Where’s Wong? What do you want with the Norn Stones? How many of you are there?”

“Two has him. They don’t know I brought you here. They aren’t as far along as I am, Doctor. They’re just doing as they’re told, Two and Three. And if they find out we’ve been talking, I’ll be punished, too.”

“One… what _are_ you?”

“Me? Oh… I guess I’m just a pile of goo.”


	16. God of Everything

This is the story that the self-ascribed God of Everything told to Loki:

Once, there was a wayward son.

He came to me from whole systems and cosmos away, although he would not tell me exactly where the place or where the star. My planet was great then. He came because he knew of my power, and that he would like to be taught. My power was marvelous. It was equal parts magic and dream. My people worshiped me, and that was my only ask of him. To recognize me for what I was, what I knew myself to be. A god. He accepted this, and worshiped me. He was my best study, and the rest of the world revered him as though he might be my son.

Seventy cycles later, he had ruined me.

He spent seventy cycles learning from me, reading from my libraries, testing and studying my artifacts. He was the strongest sorcerer I had known sans myself. I continued to ask him: from where do you hail from? Why are you not there now? Were you not capable enough to be a king in your own right? And each time I asked, he avoided my questions. I do not like to think of home, he would always say to me, and I have come to you to learn and forget about it. Maybe I might return. But I am more concerned with you, and then the next teaching would start, and so on.

Seventy cycles I taught him. Seventy cycles I loved him.

Before he ruined me, I had a lovely headdress, my most prized creation. It covered my horns most nicely in gold, and further attuned my power to their greatest heights. I would never take it off, and never would I lend it to anyone who so asked, not even him. On the day he ruined me, he asked me:

Why do you wear your headdress? Is it because you could not best me in sorcery if you took it off? I do not think you are my master anymore.

I was stunned. Why would he accuse me of such a thing? Never before had he been so accusatory, so rude of word. I told him such, and he said that he would like to challenge me in a duel, without my headdress, to show me that without it I was lesser. Infuriated, I did so. And it is my stolen headdress he now wears. My golden horns. My power. He took it from me and left my planet without a trace, condemning us all to die for I could not sustain my people without it.

And now I have brought him here, before me, as I am the last breathing being of my kind. Operator and their ilk are little more than animated golems that were once my people, as it is the only life I may grant them. I know his name now. I know where he hails. I have lied here in this throne, and I have waited for this day for centuries.

“Because,” the God of Everything was saying, “He is going to fix this.”

Loki raised his head. And then he told him the story back to him, like this:

Once, there was a frustrated, wayward son, and he was me.

I had left Asgard for I believed that what I sought could not be found there, and no-one much noticed or cared for my going except for one, who was too bound to Midgard to set off to find me. I wanted to become stronger in my own way, as what my people considered strength was no fit for me. As I adventured through the cosmos, I came across this planet, owned by a lord who looked like a dragon and wore a headdress that granted him power so that he confused himself for a god. He ruled like a tyrant. He demanded worship from his subjects, tithes and baubles. But he was powerful, and so I stayed my tongue that I could learn.

Seventy years later, I had enough.

I knew his headdress was his claim, and I knew without it he was so little that perhaps his subjects would overthrow him, as behind his back I had fanned those flames. He said he loved me as a son, but what he meant was that he loved me as an object. I was his toy, a favorite plaything. I endured this for as long as I could because I wanted to learn and be taught in magical arts that would never be found in my home. He questioned me because he knew I was thinking of going away and wanted to follow me to take me back if it came to it. I refused to tell him a word.

Seventy years I dealt with him. Seventy years I hated him.

When I asked him to the duel and took his headdress, I underestimated that he might end his own world in his rage. It did not need him. It never needed him. But he razed it anyway, and now we are here. He’s taken his people’s souls and put them into golems because they fought back. As for me, I had moved on.

Loki stood. “I am Loki of Asgard,” he told the God who was anything but a god, “And I am not fixing you.”

The dragon stared at him, putting the Norn Stone down between them. Loki’s eyes widened when he saw it, but he said nothing. He simply shook his head.

“You can use this,” the dragon said, “To fix me. There are only three. Not eight, not five. Only three.”

“I owe you nothing.” Loki’s voice was a flat line.

“I know.”

Loki was surprised at the admission, gravelly and low it might have been. He thought that, maybe, as he was dying, he had some moment of clarity through pitting his story against his own. Tentatively he approached the great beast—a great beast he once called Master through clenched teeth—and took the stone into his hand. It shone and thrummed by a power with which he was familiar.

“The Loki you knew is dead,” Loki said to him, a whisper then. “He has made Ikol his executor.”

“I am not going to fix you,” he continued. “I am going to give you mercy.”

The beast was unbothered. “You will fix me,” he insisted.

“These stones are not for me.”

“But you will fix me.” The beast was sure.

“What makes you so certain of that?” asked Loki, noticing Operator phase behind him too late.

_**SHUNK.** _

“This is how,” the once-God of Everything said as Loki cried out in agony, the sharp edge of a poisoned blade sticking out from his chest. While he collapsed to the ground, “And I may be dying, little Loki, but I can wait.”

* * *

 

 

_But I can wait._

“Forensics’ pulling a blank on the residue. It’s nothing they’ve seen before, but it’s definitely extraplanar.”

“Sounds like a job for Alpha Flight.”

“Yeah, well, as long as you promise to drag Loki back to Earth in one piece, Carol.”

Avengers Tower, a little past noon, the day after Thor’s mountain-boring breakdown.

Carol wasn’t exactly Tony’s favorite person, but he took comfort that he wasn’t hers, either. That meant they could be all business and no-one was there to complain about it.

Her arms were crossed. “Trust me, Tony, I can wrangle a wayward god and whatever’s hauled him off to the reaches. He doesn’t have the Dark Celestials at his beck and call anymore.”

“Good.” Tony took the time to take another sip of his scotch. “Great, actually, because I have a feeling that the Doc is going to take all three of us between myself, Cap and Point Break over there. Doctor Strange doesn’t just up and disappear unless something is seriously going down.”

“What about Jen? T’Challa?”

“Out doing their own thing, as usual. But I’ve let them know that the horn could sound at any time.”

 _Huh._ Carol seemed satisfied with that. “I’ve got no guarantees that we can find Loki off of some space residue, but it’s got to be something of a lead. How’s Thor holding up?”

Tony just gestured in the direction of the rubble.

“Figured.” She turned her head back around. “He say anything about the power of the Stones if Loki’s collected them?”

“They’re known to be able to grant wishes, and the last we saw them, they were the only thing that kept the Asgardians fighting during the Siege of Asgard by HAMMER. In short: don’t want the trickster god having a second run with them.”

“Well,” she said, sparks of solar energy charging up around her as she started to fly out, “Good luck with your end of things, Tony.”

“Mhm.” He downed the shot. “As to you, Carol.”

 _To think I’ve got to be cheering on the woman that put me in a coma._ No rest for the wicked.

* * *

 

 

Paradise-adjacent.

“I don’t have the Stones,” Stephen said. “Loki took them, and he’s not on this planet. I’ve tried to scry him. You didn’t answer my question, One. What does your people want with them?”

“It’s not about what they want,” said One, coming into view with a tray of what looked to be cooked chicken and plucked mussels in her arms. “It’s about what I want, Doctor. And I want a soul.” She held it out, but he sent it away with a wave of the hand.

“I can’t eat that. My metabolism isn’t regular.” Something in the back of his mind told him to not accept food from apparent shapechanging amorphous blobs, anyway. (Especially ones currently, for all intents and purposes, holding you prisoner. There was more than one part of this that stank something rotten.)

“Is it?” She put it away. “Interesting. I just dissolve everything. I don’t think I need to eat.”

“If you won’t tell me what your people want with the Stones, could you at least tell me if you’re standing with them or me?”

“Myself,” One answered. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? To stand for yourself? I don’t like standing with Four. She’s dull.”

 _Lord._ He had his head in his hands. _It’s as though I’m speaking to a less human Loki._

And then, _Loki…_

Stephen tried to force the thought from his mind, pulling down to have one hand tight on the other’s wrist. He wasn’t going to show weakness like that in front of the entity he had so far until this point known as the villain, even if she was revealed to be little more than a mildly pleasant face with an even more confusing set of motivations. Loki did as Loki does. It was his own fault for believing that this was to be any different.

“So Four is the center of this operation.”

“She orders us around. I never liked her. What’s the word,”—she made a noise Stephen figured to be like _um,_ but it was more a burp—“Secretive? I think so. Two and Three trust her, but I don’t. I think they’re afraid of the consequences if they don’t listen.”

“And you’re not.”

“Not anymore.”

Stephen considered it. It wouldn’t be the first time that something went awry in the forces of magic and gave birth to what was akin to life, but they were rarely as intelligent as One and the others she’d been alluding to. He decided that they couldn’t be evil, necessarily, but if One was a splinter cell, then the resolution to this whole mess was already bargaining something ruddy. And there was the small detail of them being apparently immune to magic…

“One.”

She looked at him.

“How do you deflect my spells?”

There was that burping sound again, as though she didn’t quite understand what he meant. He held his fingers to his chin.

“In Paris. You saw the mirror dimension from reality. It’s supposed to be invisible to all but the caster from the outside. Do you know how?”

“You have bright eyes,” she told him. “They’re very light. Not like mine. Mine are just dark.”

And now it was Stephen’s turn to question what was meant.

“Are you telling me you see differently than people?”

“I see things. Shapes. But I see magic, too. It’s red and blue and yellow and it’s all around. It’s been getting brighter lately. Four says that’s a good thing. We need it to be brighter.”

It was with this roundabout explanation that led to nowhere in particular that got Stephen thinking. If One was born from magic, and apparently soulless… was she a living being? Were any of them? Or were they avatars of the very force itself given sentience by sheer accident?

“One,” he said. “I need Wong. I can help you if you can get me to Wong.”

“Two has him,” she repeated. “In Paradise. They’ll know something’s wrong if I take him myself.”

Stephen sat back. “Then well, I suppose we’re going to have to do something of a jailbreak.”


	17. Alive

The Sanctum Sanctorum.

It wasn’t in the worst shape Zelma remembered it being (that title still belonged with the Imperator), but with not one but two gaping holes in it between the emblem window and the lower level corner where the kitchen sat, she felt the same way as one might on receiving a house “for free” while half of it was in disarray. Standing on the steps with her arm in a sling, she whistled, opened the door, and resisted the urge to sigh.

“Well, Bats,” Zelma said, “Stephen’s got himself in trouble again.”

“Wouldn’t be him if he didn’t,” Bats replied, tucking himself loose from her leash. “You think?”

“I know so.” She hung it up with her coat. “Try being his secretary for a couple years. The things you see… this doesn’t make the top three.”

“And Loki’s on the loose.”

“And Loki’s on the loose,” repeated Zelma, although she didn’t believe it. Maybe she was investing too much faith in a god that, not even a few months ago, was already back at it with terrorizing Manhattan and the rest of the planet with the Dark Celestials. Then again, maybe she knew Loki just enough that the easiest answer to reach for was never the right one. She simply hoped that Stephen knew it, too.

Pause.

_Wherever you morons are,_ she thought.

“Hey, baby,” said the snakes, slithering on the railing connecting to the foyer stairs. “How you doing?”

“Don’t talk to the snakes,” Zelma told them on impulse, then considered it, then turned away. “Nope. I’m not that mopey to go for that.”

The snakes seemed to hiss in disappointment. They slithered off to some other forgotten corner of the house.

Zelma sipped her coffee (oh-so-cheerfully liberated from a Starbucks several blocks away) then sat on a sofa, Bats’s ghostly form floating into her lap. In earnest, she didn’t know what to make of the situation. Sure, she could trust that Stephen was pulling through in his own convoluted way, and there was the not insignificant chance that Loki hadn’t fucked off to some unknown corner of the universe to plot his next attempt at taking over the world in true melodramatic, supervillainous fashion, but the bottom line was that this whole scenario, from Wong’s disappearance to the entrance of apparently several aliens with ambiguous intentions, was complex in ways that none of her last misadventures with the Sorcerer Supreme—Stephen or Loki—ever were.

Empirikul? Evil alien race obsessed with destroying magic. Easy.

Karl Mordo? Bus boy for Dormmamu. Easy.

The Weirdworld? Protect a poisoned Stephen from its inhabitants so they could escape. Easy.

This…

This was far from that.

Norn Stones, demons of every color and shape, rumblings of somehow worse things on the horizon, with one Master of the Mystic Arts and trickster god at the center of it. They were working on maybe half the knowledge of what they were dealing with let alone how to handle them, and now, Zelma was sure, it was going to come to a head in a manner far more explosive than the one that had broken her arm. Just her luck.

“Bats?” Zelma was petting him.

“Yeah?”

“How long do you think it’s going to be before we have Captain America and Iron Man at our door begging me to help them find the Doctor and Loki?”

“Hrm… I dunno. Maybe a’couple days?”

She smirked.

“Try eight hours.”

 

* * *

 

“We’re dying again.”

“ _He’s_ dying, you invalid. We’ve all already died before.”

“Can he even hear us? He’s writhing about on the ground though he might be a beached fish.”

“What should we write for his epitaph? ‘O Ikol-Loki, you were the best-worst copy, perished too soon being poisoned answering for sins you didn’t personally commit’?”

“That would acknowledge him as a Loki. He should die with solely the reversed name for forcing me to witness this from the Void.”

“Hmpth. We spit on our graves more creatively than that.”

“We don’t get graves, you—”

“All of you, please, do shut up. You’re like a gaggle of gossiping harpies. Gossiping _undead_ harpies, I should add.”

Across the ruinous court of the once-God of Everything, transparent, green-trimmed silhouettes of Lokis past were loitering, watching our Loki sputter and squirm in an agony not quite as harsh as having each individual bone of yours shattered with a particular Uru hammer, but not by much. The last speaker was Kid Loki, and they looked to him now with various looks of confusion and bewilderment.

“What? Aren’t you enjoying this better than any of us?” asked the Loki Who Burned. “He murdered you. He came from me and yet I find this personally cathartic. Granted, this is divine entertainment compared to the nothingness between the Void’s jowls.”

Kid Loki ignored him, standing over our Loki.

“Are you really going to let yourself die?”

Our Loki saw him, then averted his gaze, unable to answer. He was clutching the wound in his chest, a pool of blood a smear against the floor’s crumpled roughage. Even if he could seize the use of his vocal chords (which he couldn’t), we doubt he’d have anything to say. Kid Loki knew it as well as we did.

“Okay, sure. Using the Norn Stones to heal yourself and not him would prove the harpies east of me right. Still, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this space dragon is solely a victim. He was a tyrant. You stole his magic headdress from him and he knows he’s not getting it back, so out of spite, he wants to watch you suffer.”

Another sputter, followed after by creased brows, topped with sweat as if to say, _Why do you care?_

Kid Loki sat down next to him, ethereal form glistening in the low, blue light of the dead planet’s alive sun.

“You killed me, Ikol. You were a magpie on my shoulder whispering lies until I fell for them. The Void is no cushy retirement home for us Lokis-in-the-past, and I know you know this because you spent months there to prove a point to King Loki. I care because I know you weren’t given a choice.”

“He could have not killed you,” said Satan-Loki behind him. “Is that not a choice?”

“He had to kill me in order to live. I don’t see that as a choice, do you?”

“Tch. You sound different since the last time we appeared to him. Change your mind on calling him a horrible person who would undoubtedly ruin everything, little Loki?” The God of Evil was the one who threw that particular barb.

Our Loki, for the effort, continued on with the dying.

“You can either die and be remembered as a murderous false start, Ikol, or do something different. You’re the One Who Changed, aren’t you? Who said changing meant having to die when the alternative is making your past selves vindicated or putting a draconian tyrant back on the board?” Kid Loki crossed his arms. “You took a third option with King Loki. There’s a third option now. You and I both know what it is.”

“Useless trying to talk sense to him, boy,” chortled the Loki Who Burned. “He’ll do anything including dying to make us old crones a little less right in saying that he hasn’t changed a whit. Ever the self-obsessed goody-two-shoes for a murderer. Best to just let him die. Perhaps the successor will be less of an inconsistent disappointment.”

Kid Loki sighed. He was beginning to understand why Ikol always had two feet on the ground as far as running from his past was concerned. No amount of redemption arc, changing his epithet to God of Stories, or delicately balancing good and evil as only a trickster can would ever convince himself that this chapter of his life was over, and them less still. More than a monkey on his back, our Loki had the full ensemble telling him over and over that there was nothing but to be Loki, and to be Loki meant spurning everyone for yourself.

So, after some time (and some more writhing), Kid Loki said this:

“Thor believes in you.”

And the dominoes were set in motion.

Domino one—

“Thor believes in you, Ikol,” Kid Loki repeated. “He always has. Even at his angriest, when he learned of what you did to me, did he believe in you.”

Which toppled domino two—

“You have a life outside of subverting heroism, Ikol. Stephen has given you an opportunity to do some right in the world. The Norn Stones have given you the opportunity to see it through. Don’t you want to be more than this? More than the Loki who killed and felt sorry about it?”

Then three, four, and five—

“The God of Everything never was a god. He will die in his delusions. His golems should realize what he’s done to them with time. This planet is gone, but they will continue. Life marches on.”

And finally—

“Don’t die on me, you idiot. You’re the best chance I have for getting back at these old bastards.”

Vision reeling and water in his eyes, our Loki twisted to sit up, clutching the Stones in trembling hands. The God of Everything, who could not smile with face, smiled with presence and waited for his absolution. Finally. After all these years of decaying, turning to dust, would he be delivered a cure. This world would be his again. And they would love him for it. And they would—and they would—and they—wait, where did—

The God of Everything, who was really the God of Nothing, screamed in a rage to shatter the light.

Loki was gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Asgard. Ages and ages ago.

“I don’t like this, Loki,” Thor complained, crouched over a myriad of mountain rubble and boulders. “They’re goats. Who would be impressed with a chariot pulled by goats?”

“Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder are the most stubborn animals in Asgard, Thor. These billy goats have been broken by no-one. Not even me. Stubborn enough to be perfect for one Prince of Asgard,” Loki told him, nudging him playfully on the arm.

“I’m not maintaining their barn,” mumbled Thor.

“The servants will, obviously. Or they can answer to Father.”

Thor considered this, then yawned. “I should get the dwarves to make a saddle for them. Breaking them in by myself would be too difficult.”

Loki laughed. “Chickening out already, Thor? What a fall from grace. Perhaps you should start with a mare for your mount.”

Thor whacked him in the side. Loki, yelping, cursed under his breath while Thor laughed the same he had.

“Don’t be cross, brother. I will break these goats. And the rest of Asgardia will know the reign of Toothgnather and Toothgri—”

A portal opened behind them, a lanky, horned figure collapsing through, smacking on the rocky earth with a surprisingly airy **_THUD_**. They squealed in unison, then whipped around.

Beat. Thor and Loki looked between each other.

“Uh.”

“Um.”

“Looks a little like you, Loki—”

“Hush!” Loki stood up, looking over the body. “Is he dead?”

“Here.” Thor pointed at his chest. “He’s still breathing. But that’s a big gash. He’s been stabbed.”

“He doesn’t seem to be a giant or a troll or any Aesir I know. What strange magic. Do you understand us, man-who-is-dying?”

Loki-who-is-dying responded with only a wheeze.

Thor went over and propped him up, wrapping the hole in his core with his shirt. “We should bring him back to Asgardia. Maybe he’s a messenger who’s been hurt on the way back. Father will want to heart what he might say.”

“If he’s a messenger, he would’ve wrote it down,” said Loki. “They always do. _In case_ they die. We don’t need to rush.”

“Loki!” Thor cried. “Have you no compassion?”

“A jest, brother,” Loki said, although he did not sound too convincing. “Come. I know a quicker way back than the one we came. Hope he doesn’t seize on the way. Dragging corpses is the worst.”

“You’re the worst, brother,” lamented Thor, bringing the man up on his shoulder to share his other side with Loki’s. “It’s not gallows humor if it’s solely disturbing.”

As for the Loki-who-is-dying, unable to say anything, could not articulate swift regret.


	18. Around the World

Imagine an abyss. An abyss of, while not nothing, nevertheless long and dark and silent and unknowable. In this abyss, something happened. A spark. Living here, just waiting among the kindle as the whole thing set to a blaze. The abyss burned. It choked. And, eventually, it retched, springing forth life that, which was not life, but which was not dead.

This was how One and her others were born.

The abyss, of course, was magic itself—the very same magic brought to its knees by the Empirikul—and One was a response to the fire. They all were. Except they came with no divine mandate, no missive to protect that which created them, nothing. They weren’t guardians. More of an antibody to an infection now already in process of tending by the Sorcerer Supreme. Without a cause to rally behind and intense power encapsulating their very state of being, maybe falling left of center was inevitable.

As for One, she only cared about the gaping hole in her heart where there wasn’t a soul.

“So, as I understand this, you’re a being of pure magic given form.”

“That’s what Four says, yes,” she answered, twirling her hair (which was not really hair, only convincing imitation), feeling a particular emotion come across her. She knew it as “boredom”.

“And you and your siblings only started existing _after_ the Empirikul laid waste to magic.”

“You’re curious,” One observed. “I think that’s a good thing.”

Stephen was pacing back and forth in the room, thinking about this and that and the other, she figured. She noticed that he was always thinking about something, and she didn’t know what that was like. Frankly, she thought about only what interested her, and what Four wanted her to do. Thinking coherently every second would make her worry. Did it make him worry? It must have. She pitied him.

“I’ve never encountered beings made _of_ magic before. And the fact you came after it died in every practical sense confuses me even further. It’s as though you and your people are… some sort of delayed, late immune response. You’re no extraterrestrials at all. Only that you’re less benevolent than I could have imagined and more sociopathic.”

One took a bite from the food platter she’d offered him earlier. Strawberries. She licked her lips. Delicious.

“Paradise. Tell me about Paradise. Where is it? It can’t be off-world, I’d have sensed the change.”

So sweet. She loved sweet things. They dematerialized right in her stomach.

“One?”

“Oh, you’re talking to me,” she said, between the half of the strawberry still stuck in her imitation-teeth. “I thought you were still talking to yourself.”

Stephen made that face she’d saw him do rather a lot since she brought him here—he would stare at her, and one of his eyebrows would raise, and she thought it a little strange that it was only one or the other. She mimicked it a few times up to now, but he didn’t seem to catch on. Maybe she was using it improperly.

“Four made Paradise. She said she wanted to make her own garden. It’s a nice garden. These strawberries are from there. Three likes to tend to the garden. I don’t know where it is, if you’re asking where compared to other wheres. It’s just where Paradise is.”

Then Stephen did the other thing she’d saw him do rather a lot—stroking those weird hairs hanging off his chin. She didn’t mimic that, because she didn’t have those weird hairs and she didn’t want to grow any.

“Underground, I figure. The pressure in this air would imply that. Can all of you teleport like you do?”

“Teleport?” She asked, not having heard the word before.

“When you came to the Sanctorum. You teleported. No portal, no jump portent. I doubt you leave anything behind. Can all of you do that?”

“…” One considered it. She had seen Four do it, but Four could do anything because she was Four. Two and Three rarely went anywhere outside of Paradise. She thought maybe they were able to, but she’d never see them do it. Could be that they were “embarrassed” about not being able to, so they wouldn’t do anything that would make them leave Paradise. Three was always like that. One wouldn’t trust that Three was able to do much of anything that wasn’t listening to Four and growing more plants.

“I don’t know. Four can, though. Is that okay? Not knowing?”

“It’s an answer,” Stephen replied. “Answers are better than when you weasel your way out of giving them, One.” He returned to pacing and One returned to scarfing down the rest of the strawberries, still uncertain if she needed to ever actually eat.

Stephen was talking to himself again, and One wasn’t really listening. He said words like “Avengers” and “kill me”, which were equally confusing to her, as she didn’t have a clue who the Avengers were or why they might want to kill him. She noticed that a lot of people wanted to kill him, sometimes specifically hills. _How unfortunate,_ she thought to herself, _to be hunted by hills._

“One.”

“Yes?” She’d since learned to perk up when he called for her.

“Do you have a real name?”

“My name is One,” she said. “Is that not a ‘real name’?”

“It’s a designation,” Stephen told her. “Not a name. Such as mine—Stephen Strange.”

“Huh. You mean a human name. No, I don’t have one. Should I?”

“It would make differentiating you from your siblings of thus far dubious morality easier. Such as… have you considered Eve?”

 _Eve_. The way he said it sounded to One as if he was referring to something as humans so often did—Four would say that they weren’t very original. They were always pulling from other ideas, repeating it as though they’d come up with it by themselves and not from another place. Maybe it had something to do with Paradise. But One hadn’t heard of such a thing, knowing not what he was alluding to, but she did know that the name sounded pretty.

So she said: “Sure.”

And now One was Eve. She didn’t feel any different.

“Back to Wong. You say your brother Two has him, correct? Where would they be?” asked Stephen.

“Hmm…” Again she considered it. “In Paradise, I would think, in the gardens. Two likes showing him around, as does Three. We haven’t had a human in the gardens before. They don’t seem to care that he doesn’t have anything to say when they introduce everything.”

“Because you damaged his mind,” Stephen replied, and even Eve could catch his derision.

“No, no. We don’t damage. I changed him. I could change him back. That’s what Four says I’m good at: changing. Shape, humans, space. It’s why I show myself to you humans, because I’m good at it, and understanding you.”

Stephen paused. He was facing the door leading out and to the rest of Paradise, and Eve was lamenting that she’d eaten the last of the strawberries without noticing. Now she’d have to bargain with Three for more, which she hated to do. Three was always so meek and hard to speak to. He would make annoying sounds like _uh_ and _um_ without getting to the point of what he was saying.

“Eve,” he said, glancing her way. She met his gaze with her lavender-like, mottled and pupiless eyes. His aura was a pleasing turquoise. “Do you know what lying is?”

“Something humans do,” she responded. “When you say one thing but you mean the opposite. I don’t know why they do it. It seems inconvenient. People are angry when they find out, and angry people hurt you, sometimes with word and sometimes with fist.”

“But you know what it is. And you could do it for me if it meant I could help you find a soul.”

She tilted her head. “What are you planning, sorcerer?”

“Nothing drastic just yet,” he said, and she had trouble believing him with his darker tone. “If you could present me to the rest of the gardens as being like Wong—with a muted mind, then I could get close to him and the others. Learn from a distance, and rescue him without you being indicted for anything except underestimating me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She didn’t like the idea. It sounded though it might be something Four would suggest, as Four liked things humans did even if she wouldn’t admit it. Eve secretly wondered if Four wanted to be human most of all.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I pretend you are mine like how Wong was mine before I gave him to Two. The only one who might suspect that I am lying would be Four, but I am good at distracting Four. She doesn’t know that I want a soul, so she still thinks I like listening to her.”

He held out a hand. She just stared.

“Shake it,” he said. “It’s a human way of saying we’re working together.”

“Oh.” She shook it. “Does this make us partners?”

“For now. And let’s hope that my friends in the Avengers don’t tear the lid off of this operation at the worst possible time.”

All Eve could think was this: _Truly strange. What human has friends who want to kill him?_

 

 

* * *

 

Zelma estimated it’d be eight hours before she had Steve Rogers and Tony Stark begging her to help them at the Sanctorum door.

It was closer to five.

“We have Carol handling the Loki problem of this equation,” Rogers was saying. “We need you to help us with the Doctor Strange problem of the equation.”

Looking up from her book, Zelma was cavalier. “Because you have no way of finding a wizard?”

“Because we have no way of finding a wizard.” Rogers was at least honest. She wondered if they always were, or if they were on account of the danger involved with the current situation.

Zelma laughed lightly, letting Bats float off her lap before she stood. “Man, you guys would be so, so lost and screwed if Stephen ever went evil, you know that? You’d be flailing around like headless chickens. I’m surprised he’s never so much as thought about it. Lucky us, right?”

“Selfish streaks don’t make a villain,” Tony said, as if Zelma needed to know who would be divulging that nugget of ‘wisdom’. “Just bad teammates.”

“Seem to get on as well as you can, Tony,” said Cap. Tony rolled his eyes.

“I’ve been… getting better. Gandalf though, he hasn’t been punished for being a self-obsessed jerkoff nearly as much. Probably on account of the magic.”

Cap was looking for her. “So you’ll help us, Miss Zelma Stanton?”

“Zelma, please,” she replied, putting the book aloft to find its shelf as she led them on further into the Sanctorum. “I know Stephen loves his proper name and title, but I’m a librarian at heart. Even if, I suppose, I’ve sort of inherited the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme in what is maybe the most convoluted way I’ve ever imagined it happening. No heroic death, no tearful succession, just two morons kissing each other and getting tangled up in a bad decision cascade.” She rubbed her hands. “And I abet them. Sorry about that.”

“We all make our mistakes,” said Tony, without a hint of irony.

Zelma went up the foyer and into a study, the same study that now held the book of clairvoyance they’d stolen. She thought about giving it back for them to take to Thor, but figured that Thor wasn’t here in the Sanctorum with them for a reason. Doing whatever gods did when they were angry and had a right to be, Zelma imagined. Smashing trolls and giants and mountains and cities. Causing hurricanes. That sort of stuff.

“Fortunately, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find him if he really has been kidnapped. There’s some scrying texts in here that can help us a ton. Only issue is that unlike Mister Master of the Mystic Arts, I still need some physical reagents for the spells. And those have to be bought.”

“Bought?” asked Cap. “From whom?”

“Magician specialty supply store?” Tony offered.

“A little something like that,” Zelma said as she plucked a book from the shelves with surprising strength for it was about as tall as she was wide. Putting it down on the study desk, she opened it to the middle where the binding rested naturally and took out, of all things, her phone.

Tony and Cap, although silent, wondered with their stares.

“Oh!” She snapped up. “I know, weird right? But the goblins actually let you order through the phone now.”

“Uh…” Tony raised a brow. “Goblins?”

“Yes. Black market goblins. They’re pricey, but the quickest and most reliable for what I need. Stephen can cry about the hit to his account balance later. Instant deluxe shipping is not cheap.”

“Instant deluxe shipping. You’re telling me Amazon has been outdone by… goblins?” Tony was incredulous.

“Several times over,” affirmed Zelma. “Now, please, if you handsome but clueless Avengers would let me place the call.” She scanned lines off the book with her finger, turning to her phone screen as she went to her dialer, and noticed something out of the blue.

_**NEW TEXT MESSAGE.** _

_Um._ From who? She went up to her notifications and tapped it out.

_**L Laufeyson.** _

And suddenly, inextricably, Zelma felt twice as tired.

 **LL:** Are you around?

 **ZS:** Loki? Are you seriously texting me right now when the entire world is looking for you?

 **LL:** Are you around?

 **ZS:** Yes, I’m around. I also have Iron Man and Captain America staring at me like I have three heads, in case you were wondering. Where are you?

 **LL:** Lost in time. I was poisoned. Almost died. Using a spell of transdimensional reception to text you. Calling would be too conspicuous where I am.

 **ZS:** Lost in time?

 **LL:** In the past. Long story. Remind me to tell you when I’m back. Going to fix some things. Wanted to tell you I have the Norn Stones. They’re safe.

 **ZS:** Safe as safe can be with you, you mean. What do you mean by fix some things? Now it’s as though I have five heads.

 **LL:** There’s something I need to do in the past. Probably another in the future. OK? Are things OK over there?

 **ZS:** Aside from the fact that Stephen is missing and one of our friends in the probably-aliens are most likely responsible for taking him, yes. We could use your help, Loki. Especially if you have the magic wishing stones we’ve been hunting for weeks now.

_**LL is typing…** _

Zelma glanced up at the Avengers, smiled, and went back to her screen. Tony and Cap, for their merit, just looked at each other.

 **LL:** The crime that will not be forgiven. I’ll try to be quick, Zelma.

 **ZS:** You have cryptic answers worse than Stephen, Loki. Gotta go. Just keep yourself out of anymore trouble, OK?

 **LL:** OK. Bye.

_If that wasn’t the most surreal exchange of my entire life._

“Hey, sorry. But I got some news from Moron Number One. He says he’s very sorry about disappearing off the face of the Earth and is going to make some amends. Jury's still out on Moron Number Two, though.”

She tapped some more. “If I could find their damn number… ah, there it is. Time to bring Stephen’s account with them to its knees.”


	19. Four Letter Word

Asgard, ages and ages ago.

_Just keep yourself out of anymore trouble, OK?_

As though that were in any way possible.

But the Loki who’s at rest in one of the palace’s many superfluous rooms is not the one we follow beginning this scene; rather, the shorter, reedier, no less Loki Loki, the one who belonged here in this given timeline and would for several thousand years out. Although he claimed not to recognize the man who had made such a sudden, unexplained entrance into their realm, as did Thor and the others, he was lying (hold your surprise)—but then, so was the man, pretending that he was still somehow mute from his injury even as it’d more or less closed and the poison was burned away with fever over the last few nights.

Like had a way with knowing like.

He didn’t have to approach him. Didn’t have to so much as acknowledge his presence in the golden walls of Asgardia. Let the healers and the maids and Mother and Father deal with him. He could be spending the day with Thor, as he usually did, and liked to. Emphasis could be. Naturally, he wasn’t.

We don’t have to venture far to guess why.

He knocked once on the door, considered doing it again, then just popped it open and came inside, hot on the heels of having spurned Thor for couching those goats together, as much as it’d been Loki’s idea to start with. He’d be manhandled by Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder to an audience of one today.

“You returned.” It was an accusation.

The adult Loki watched him walk to the foot of the bed, green eyes gleaming with half of something he didn’t quite catch and another something he could estimate as bemusement. He was sitting up on a mound of pillows. Chest bare, covered by gauze on the left side of his shoulder. The horns survived, shinier than when he was first dragged here. Then, abruptly, he decided to smile with all of his teeth in one long viperous grin.

It didn’t amuse. “ _Speak._ ”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” admitted adult-Loki, voice scratchy and hoarse. “Something came up.” A finger tapped the gauze.

“I noticed. But thy choose _now_ to return to, where I would remember you. Why?”

Adult-Loki bounced the notion around by a humming in his throat, gently swaying his head. The Loki of this timeline just watched, baffled that he would need to even think about it—did he not always have a reason?

“I wanted to see you,” he said, finally, and that did sound like the truth, or some version of it. “We can talk, if you’d like.”

Adolescent-Loki had his arms crossed. “You made me a god. I want to know why.”

“Better than living a giant, isn’t it?” asked the bedridden Loki. “You knew that there was no future for you among our people, even before I came. The giants are sentenced to their cycle of cracking rocks together and huts with straw roofs. Hardly an environment for a mind such as you or I.”

“And now I live as the hated giant-prince of Asgard. I am an Aesir by the glowing springs of Yggdrasil, but that will never erase my heritage in the company of the others. You must have known this.” The words trembled toward the end, and he turned away. He wouldn’t let his older self have the satisfaction of seeing weakness. “You must.” The smaller Loki wiped away an angry tear. _Rotten bastard._ As if he would have an iota of sympathy.

Loki of after addressed him, softer now. “I did,” he said. “The choice was to be a giant and hated for being pale and tiny, or a god and hated for being a giant and a liar. The latter has more opportunity for our kind than the former. I’m not here to soothe you and tell you it gets better, little Loki. I was dying and I needed Asgard, and I have something else to do here too. But I am seeing you. You survive. It’s what we do.”

Loki of before turned around, scarfing down a sniffle before anyone would hear. “Surviving is not living.”

Loki of after smiled again, genuine this time. “No.”

“No?”

“Mischief is.”

And then they were hugging; hugging the way a father does a son, hugging the way a mentor does a treasured student, hugging the way the past who might be now a little more at peace hugs the future who is at peace, too. When they came apart, moments or minutes or whenever later, the smaller Loki pointed at the wound.

“Who?” he asked.

The older Loki simply laughed. “Ah… that. Well. An old enemy. You don’t get these horns from nothing, little Loki. If you do anything different than I… tie your loose ends.”

“You’re different.”

Adult-Loki nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“We change.”

“We change,” he agreed.

Passing the baton of perspective to our Loki underneath the duckfeather sheets, Loki the younger turned away again, watching outside the window where the morning’s slow sherbet sky met the afternoon’s still and periwinkle. Our Loki wondered if these visits were encouraging a new outcome, or merely securing his destiny when his boyish optimism melted into grown envy and hatred. Ultimately, he decided, it didn’t matter. The Norns weaved what they wished, independent of travels from one Loki to another. And it was up to the trickster of his day to do what tricksters do and buck the chains of destiny to couch a story of his own creation, come Hel or high water.

To quote a favorite Midgardian saying: it was impossible to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

(Although, he could’ve done without those few eggs being a byword for ‘millennia of mucking about as a villain to end all villains’. Nothing is ever as sweet on the surface where the God of Mischief walks.)

“You said something else.” He was still watching the window.

“I did.”

“Would you tell me?”

“Ah, I am not in the business of spoilers before they’re due, little Loki,” replied our Loki, chuckling. “But it is important. And I would appreciate your help in getting me out of the palace relatively unnoticed, from one mischief maker to another. I don’t know for how long my glamor will hold to keep our father off my trail.”

They caught each other’s smile.

“How long has it been?” asked the smaller Loki, changing spots from the window to the door. “Since you last slept in Asgardia?”

“Oh, you go for the jugular, don’t you?” Our Loki stroked his chin. “Long enough, I would suppose. I’d almost forgotten how comfortable these beds are. Thor yet snore?”

“Terribly.”

“Let me be the bringer of _some_ good news, then. He grows out of that in, say, a hundred or so years. Exchanges it for mumbling in his sleep, which I find infinitely more entertaining myself. Especially when he’s swinging at the air as though his hammer is being met with the faces of trolls and giants.”

“You’re very odd, elder,” the Loki of before said, opening the door a ways to look for anyone in the halls. Spotted a couple of guards, but no Mother or Father. That was good.

“What has you say that?”

“Thor doesn’t fight with hammers. Each time I’ve seen him hold a mallet, it’s followed by complaining that he should be using an ax.”

Our Loki shook his head, beckoning the other Loki to come closer. As he did, he whispered, “Oh, he learns to love that hammer were it his son. You’ll see with time.” They shared a look, then our Loki slowly rose to his feet, a bit wobbly around the knees for how long he’d been sleeping almost entirely uninterrupted—true rarity for his kind, and entirely having been poisoned half to death being responsible for it—but he steadied himself and started to walk. Clumsily. The smaller Loki stifled a giggle.

“Hnh…” He scanned the room. “Now where did they put my coat?”

“That dingy thing?” The younger Loki shrugged. “I sent it away to be cleaned and repaired.”

Beat.

“You did **not** send it away.”

“I have.”

Loki the younger got to have a front row seat for Loki the older’s many, many curses, the likes of which he hadn’t even heard before for the lot of them. He was largely unphased. Not much different to Thor’s triades when faced with a problem not solved through gratuitous ax to victim.

“Well,” our Loki said finally, dragging a hand down his face, “Then we’ll just have to make a _small detour._ ”

It was odd, walking through these halls again, even if it solely for the rescue of one’s favorite coat, and our Loki would be remiss not to entertain the thought while the smaller version of himself followed after. This palace was the old palace, before Asgardia was destroyed some millennia in the future and brought back to life by Thor’s unyielding passion for his people—and a copious dose of the Odinforce besides. The guards slipped them by without notice, and our Loki took the time interceding their coat-searching to reflect.

Or, he would have, were any Loki past or present any good at such a thing; that, they were not.

Instead he thought about the Norn Stones and what could be happening back in his time, as you do. If there were only three Norn Stones now, he doubted they had much in the way of infinite uses, not unlike a genie—and putting them to work to figure that out for sure without damn good reason was off the table too. He would save them for his particular purpose, and hopefully when he returned to the land of wizards and demons and magic and heroes in spandex, it wouldn’t be smoking ruin. (Even if, of course, he’d enjoy the realization of how fragile Midgard was without its most beloved trickster.)

“There! Over here,” the other Loki pointed out to him. A maid was washing it. One minor trick of the light with another coat manifested from a whole lot of nothing put into her hands later, our Loki was back to prime fashion and ready to conquer.

“Mm. Don’t believe I’ll get used to these sleeves being even again.” Or the fur lining being white as snow and not brown with whatever dirt it’d accumulated squatting in the Void. “What do you think, little Loki?”

“I hope I learn better than to dress as you.”

Our Loki laughed, and laughed _hard._ “Oh! Oh me oh my, you have not a clue, don’t you? When it comes to taste, I’m afraid I am the very best compared to earlier incarnations. I’ll say this: after you’ve spent, oh, three or so decades though you might be a horned Yuletide elf, what I’m wearing is not even offensive, it’s an upgrade.”

Loki the younger stared at him with disbelief until he felt the point was made, then felt at ease to change the subject.

“We’re at the end of the palace. What did you need me for?”

“Covering my presence with yours. In the eyes of anyone else, I’m wholly invisible. Good work, little Loki,” he said, praising him with a pat on the shoulder. “I must be going, though.”

“Hmpth.” He sloughed our Loki off to start and walk the other way. “Goodbye, elder. Hope you don’t get yourself killed.”

“For all I’ve been through?” Our Loki winked behind him. “The Multiverse has to try far harder than that.”

The roads of Asgardia soon became inlays into Asgard’s many forests and meadows. Loki remembered many days where he’d do little more than lie between the flowers and shrubs and just take in the world around him, identifying every bird that passed by, and the foxes, snakes, adders and other ones adjacent. He thought about doing it again, for old time’s sake, but he was in something of a rush.

“Alright, you can come on out,” he said to the open air. “I know you’re here, Leah.”

Loki tasted ozone as she came into existence, her permanent scowl already more than prominent. “You promised that I would not be disturbed,” she said, arms crossed. “Who’s dying now?”

“Who’s already dead is a far better question.” He nodded to her. She stared him down, eyes widening with realization.

“Ikol.”

“None other. Do you understand what I’m asking now, Leah?”

“You killed him.” She shook her head. “Damn.”

A portal opened east of him. He alluded to it with a gesture. “While I’m sure you’d very much enjoy wringing my neck for it, I have the sinking suspicion that my present time is in dire need of its God of Mischief and we can talk about it on the way. Ladies first.”

She pulled her skirts up to walk over the flowers. “Were you asking me for anything else, I would have struck you dead.”

“Glad we’re on the same page, then. Onwards. A resurrection is in order.”

_And may I never have to listen to my past selves crowing over my dying body ever again._


	20. Goblins

Although Zelma did sound enchanted with the idea, however briefly, with ordering reagents though they might be items from a rank and file grocery list and not one calling for enamored frog legs and petrified pixie dust over the phone, let us clear up one important detail.

She hated these damn goblins with all her heart.

Even the most smarmy and ruthless salesman was a pitiful lark in comparison to these stubby, green, knife-eared con-artists. She wasn’t sure when goblins began to displace regular occult stores and friendly witches down the lane when it came to selling valuable artifacts and physical spell requirements—probably with the rise of the Internet, as she’s heard that goblins beat most everyone else to the punch of ‘modernizing’—but the fact remained that they were omnipresent, largely unavoidable, and they damn well knew it. It was a crowning achievement for anyone to not be gouged by the pea sized bastards, and much of ordering with them meant keeping track of enough hidden fees and bizarre shipping taxes to make a Sorcerer Supreme’s head spin.

 _Easy does it, Zelma,_ she reminded herself. _Don’t pop a vein even before you get to chew out Moron Number Two._

After all, it was his money that was about to be shoveled into a dark place.

She, if nothing else, wanted to cling to the hope that this phone call wouldn’t involve her screaming on her side of the line.

(That hope? Lasted for about twelve seconds.)

“You **_WHAT?_** ” She took her head away from the receiver, yelled at the ceiling, then smacked it back on her face. “Let me remind you that I’m not ordering with my account. I’m ordering on behalf of Stephen Strange, you forest-colored punks! And do you want to make the Sorcerer Supreme angry? Don’t tell me you can’t pull a scrying orb out of the ether if you wanted to!”

As for the Avengers standing in the study and watching a librarian’s slow decline into insanity, Cap was stern where Stark wasn’t sure whether to laugh or consider ducking for cover. The back and forth went on for a few more minutes, Zelma appearing though she might be two steps away from spitting hellfire, before they finally reached to some compromise.

“They’re going to be delivering in person,” she said, and they nodded, unsure of the consequences if they didn’t. Zelma brushed a hair away from her eye. “Jesus. Nothing but trouble. Tell me they have to pull favors simply for that Stephen’s lost his edge and saying his name alone doesn’t scare them straight anymore. Before I had to only get out the first syllable and they’d get on it like white on rice!”

Beat. “Oh, sorry. Ranting, yeah, I, uh, lost it a little, huh? Believe me, if you had to deal with them as much as we have to… well, you’d understand. You should see how Wong used to negotiate with them. Man, those were the days.” She looked up. “You boys want a drink?”

_Er…_

“I don’t see why not,” said Cap.

“As long as there isn’t an eyeball in the coffee,” Tony said.

Zelma smirked. “No eyeballs in the coffee unless you ask politely. We’ve been running low on those.”

Of course, being that the kitchenette was still half rubble and smolder, it wasn’t long before they returned to the study, and somewhere between then and now Zelma was reacquainted with the reality that not only was Stephen missing, she was entertaining company with the likes of Iron Man and Captain America. And she didn’t so much as break a fangirly sweat about the whole thing since she woke up in an Avengers hospital. Then she thought, _Wow. Is this what it’s like being the only responsible adult between the three of us with me, Stephen, and Loki?_

At least her hot chocolate was suitably chocolaty. It never did get much easier to tell which was the chocolate powder and which was the powder that’d have her third eye open (likely to the dismay of everyone who wasn’t a practicing wizard).

“So when are the uh, goblins coming?” asked Stark.

“Oh, we’ll know,” Zelma responded, paying more attention to her cup. “Usually they um, ring the doorbell. You know. Like a normal delivery guy, except he’s barely three feet and has a face punchable beyond imagination.”

Another thought: _I’m explaining goblins to Iron Man. The biggest skeptic on the planet._

So, as you do, she then asked, “Hey, Tony. How long have you know Stephen?”

His look was admittedly mild when he heard her. “Long enough to know that we’re too much alike,” he said. “Well. Aside from that you’re looking at the most brilliant mechanical mind our world has on offer, where I’m not entirely sure if he knows how to drive.”

“No,” Zelma said, “I think you two are _perfectly alike…_ ” Was in their taste in facial hair? Maybe. But she bet more on the crushing weight of their own egos should they have had physical form.

“Frankly, I haven’t got that used to this haunted house of his. The way it _creaks_ is enough for my hair to stand on end. Let alone the floating stairs ripped from a surrealist painting and how there’s always that feeling of being watched. How old is this place, anyway?”

“Old,” she said, almost automatically. Cap seemed content to listen, and pet a lounging Bats. “There’s some books of its history around here somewhere. Transcribed stuff. Used to be all oral before Stephen thought to write it down as he knew it. Says it used to be a burial ground before the first settlers”—she was smiling now—“and you know what they say about burial grounds.”

“Creative.” He finished off his cup, and as if on cue, the doorbell rung. Zelma stood (pointing at their seats so the dynamic duo would stay put, lest one of them get distracted by the snakes while she was gone) and came back holding a hefty thing that looked though it might be an old grandmother’s trunk rather than a delivered package, looking about as happy (read: furious) as when she was on the phone with them in the beginning.

“I’m gonna wring their necks, so help me,” she muttered under her breath. “Alright. I got what I need. If Stephen goes bankrupt in the next coming days, he has only himself to blame, not me.”

Only took shouting them out and eventually acquiescing to a scratch our back, we scratch yours exchange in the coming future as well as tanking his account balance, of course.

She slapped the trunk down beside the book and took out the reagents—scrying orb, beads of the faerie, other fittingly strange odds and ends—one by one, starting with the orb which was the largest and could safely sit between the pages.

“What is this? You going to tell us our fortunes?” asked Stark, without thinking. Zelma’s glare was enough for him to shut his mouth before he dug his grave any further. Cap nudged him on the shoulder, to which he replied with a glare of his own. Sure, side with her, he was probably choking on to not say. Like you’re not one of the last Avengers who believe in a god with the big G.

Oh, Tony Stark, you have no idea.

After plodding the reagents together and searching for one lost Sorcerer Supreme—

“Uh…” Zelma held her face. “Um. Hm. That’s not where I expected him to be.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Cap stood. “Where is the Doctor?”

“According to this… in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here. Let me write down the coordinates before I lose the view.”

“Middle of the Pacific?” Now they were both standing. “You sure the aliens you’re playing magic tennis with aren’t actually Namor and the Atlanteans?”

“See for yourself.” Zelma gave Cap the paper, who handed it over to Tony.

“I’ll be damned.” A hand went over his hair. “He really is in the middle of the Pacific. Guess we’re going to have to bring this to Maria herself, Cap. And hopefully Thor’s out of his break everything funk when we get there before SHIELD starts pulling from Stark Industries.”

Cap shook hands with Zelma. “Thanks for the assist. We’ll take it from here.”

Zelma watched them leave, not unlike two retrievers given their bone to chase after. Bats stirred and looked around.

“Guess they’re gone after the Doc, huh?”

“Yup.” She sat down and sighed. “I just hope Wong’s alright. He didn’t seem like himself with what we saw of him in Paris. Whatever the two morons do is nothing if they can’t save him.” She suddenly realized that a tear was halfway down her face, and rushed a finger to dash it. Bats phased up through the table and licked her hand, ectoplasmic tongue almost good as the real thing.

“Don’t you worry none, Zelma,” he said. “No matter what, I know the Doc’s gonna pull through. It’s what he does. No ego or trickster gets between him and his patient. I’d know. I was a lost cause ‘till he came, and the best damn days of this old dog’s life were with him. Had every condition in the book, yannow. Never gave up. ‘Course, that didn’t stop my heart from going when the time came, but he cared anyway.”

She smiled softly and hugged him as well as you hug a ghost.

“I know, Bats.” Another tear slipped down. “I just… you know. Feels like my fault. I didn’t do enough.”

“We do as much as we can.” Bats was sure. “That’s all that matters.”

 

* * *

 

 

Maria Hill ran tighter than a tight ship—she could get a helicarrier aloft in an hour where another director would be counting his chickens for five. SHIELD’s brightest, most productive days were with her at the helm, where she trimmed down the need for controversial secrecy and transformed the organization into an international force for global security the likes of which not even an invasion by the Skrull could crack. Her secret?

The best stress ball money could buy.

“I take it you two have brought me any news,” she said from her desk, the ball crushed under her forefinger and thumb. It squished with only the slightest squeak. “Is that right, Stark?”

“We’ve got a lock for coordinates, Miss Hill,” said Cap, and Tony flung a hologram on screen for Hill to assess herself. “The location is, as you might expect, a bit odd, and then there’s the issue of Namor—”

“The Pacific.” _Squuuuish._ “Great. We don’t have an assessment on the situation inside, do we?”

“No. My satellites haven’t detected anything in the area. We’re assuming the structure is cloaked.”

“Blind leading the blind.” She let go of the ball— _squeak…_ —and pulled out a sheaf of papers, ending up with a tablet that she typed into with a speed that would make Quicksilver think twice. “I have a modified Quinjet ready to go that should keep our Atlantean king off the trail long enough for an extraction. Any information for what we’re dealing with?”

“Ready to go?” asked Cap. “As in, right now? We’re skipping diplomacy with Namor? If he finds out we’ve been in his waters…”

“… I’ll deal with it. My focus lies with getting this done as soon as possible.”

Tony answered her original question. “Hearsay and readings from my suit from the night in Paris. They’re intelligent and pack a punch. That’s about as much as I can say for sure. I’ve got no clue what the Doctor is doing if they have him.”

“I do have some good news,” Hill said, her head still down at the screen, passwords and clearance queries flying by. “Alpha Flight’s reported back and they know where the residue from the explosion came from. Planet a hundred or so light years away. Carol’s rallied the troops for landfall.”

“Goodie.” Tony sent his hologram away. “Who’s cleared for this?”

“You, the Captain, and Thor.” Hill tucked the tablet back in its place below her desk. “If worse comes to worse, sound the horn. We want to be posted throughout. If this is some new extraterrestrial threat, I want a full report come Monday.”

They said their goodbyes, and away they went. Hill palmed the ball back. _Squish._ **_Squish._**

_You best be ready to eat grass for what I’m going to do when this is over, Stephen Strange._

 

* * *

 

 

“You are the worst kind of idiot, Ikol. The one who believes he can right his wrongs.”

“Please, Leah, I do know what I’m doing. And this isn’t righting wrongs… more… shall we say, apologizing for them in a way far more tangible than what I have done previously.”

The future, where Odinforce is Thorforce.

“I preferred you as a magpie.” Leah was crouched over a chalked out ritual circle, the bones holding up her hair prominent as she touched them off. Loki was watching her, secretly stoking away the anxiety that this wouldn’t work and he’d might be wasting precious time and the Norn Stones for trying to coax some right out of his long, _long_ list of wrongs, as Leah was so cavalier to tell him. “Least then half your talk was bird-speak and unintelligible to me.”

“You’re not the only one. Alas, a magpie I am no longer, and a God of Mischief I must be.”

“And here? You’re making it seem as though we could be doing this in the present. What’s the deal with a future’s Asgardia?”

Loki smiled one of his _Oh, wouldn’t you like to know_ smiles, the kind where you surely know he was getting off to how smart he was about to sound (at least in his own head).

“It’s a great deal easier siphoning off of some of the king’s power for putting dead bygone soul in a not so dead and bygone simulacrum when he’s Thor and not my father, dear Leah. I’m sure he won’t notice anything. After all, these Stones are timeline agnostic, unlike another, more multicolor set of stones…”

“Hush. The ritual is about to begin. Hearing you speak is sickening enough.”

They held hands—pure necessity, we assure you—and a sphere of caustic-colored, green energy enveloped them, Norn Stones levitating around the wooden simulacrum, speeding up, sweat beating their brows, a rush of power hitting like a great, unstoppable tidal wave, and then…

And then… and then…

A boy watched his hands, unsure if they were real.

“Good afternoon,” said our Loki. “Tearful reunion in due part. We have Midgard to save from itself. What do you say?”

Kid Loki looked up, and after a while, grinned that same knowing grin.

“Yes.” He stood. “Let’s.”

Such was how a murderous magpie made a god took back at least one of his sins. If only he could see the faces of his forefathers now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I know, I know, Kid Loki's resurrection in Asgardians of the Galaxy probably has nothing to do with Ikol, but let me believe. Also, after the next chapter (and this story hits 50k for Nanowrimo), I'm going to spend time editing the earlier chapters, because yuck, even my touched-up first drafts are bloody disgusting. Comments and kudos are appreciated!


	21. Paradise

Stepping into the biosphere of Paradise wasn’t the same as first stepping out to the dinosaur-spectacle that is the Savage Land.

It did, however, come close.

It boggled Stephen’s mind, really, of how much Eve had understated their habitation; there were entire scores of forests flanking where he’d arrived, followed after by soft hills and intelligently curated shrubberies, complemented by not the walls of the underground, but a spherical pane of thick glass that vented the view to a glittering, fish-wound Pacific. They created this? Only four of them? In the matter of what, months, maybe only a year? He was completely taken aback. This was the sort of purview he expected from an otherworldly dimension of cuttle-ticks and flower-beasts, not on his world, and certainly not from a place of magic risen out from under its ashes.

Were they the villains, after all…?

(Then he remembered that they had Wong, and as easily as that awe held him, it slipped through. They had Wong. No amount of anything hinting to the contrary was going to convince Stephen otherwise.)

“This is Paradise,” Eve said, deadpan. “My home.”

Stephen wanted to say something to the tune of _I don’t understand,_ but caught himself, as it’d been around the fifth he’s said that already since being brought here. Eve could infer it by the way his eyes were bulging from their sockets, couldn’t she?

Apparently, a little. “Is it that shocking?”

“Somewhat,” Stephen replied, joining in on the chorus of understating. “It’s unprecedented, for sure. Where are your siblings?”

“Further in.” Then she looked back behind her, meeting his gaze (as well as you could without any pupils to speak of). “The god. Do you think the god would enjoy this place?” ‘ _The god_ ’. As matter of fact as ever. Stephen, for his part, stiffened.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Loki is… complicated. Not unlike you or your siblings, I imagine.” _And also ran off-planet with the Norn Stones._ You know, no big deal. Doesn’t at all bother him. Ignore the tremors in his fingers—those happen without warning or meaning, he’d say. Sometimes the nerves get ahead of themselves. Nothing whatsoever to do with the rage he’d so far thrown a lid over though it were a boiling pot, now just starting to bubble over.

Eve watched him, then started to walk. “The god is important to you.”

And it kept bubbling.

“Not necessarily.” Stephen tried to keep to her leisurely pace. “He’s my burden, in putting it simply. No-one else wants to deal with him. I got the short stick. As always.”

“You seemed fond of her when we first met.” Eve’s tone was a dull point, and yet that didn’t make it any less scathing with the mood Stephen was in.

 _She slept with me and stole an artifact while pretending she’s any different than before._ The words were only inches from being flung from his tongue. But it wasn’t as though Eve would understand; amorphous blob being with no concept of regular relationships, Stephen reminded himself. Don’t scream at the amorphous blob being unless it’s something she could understand. Don’t…

“You learn that Loki is never what she seems,” Stephen finally said, trying to place distance in his voice (didn’t work nearly as well as he would’ve liked, to nobody’s surprise). “And that’s an advantage only for her.”

 _Idiot,_ he thought. You were such an idiot, _Stephen. A lonely old bastard who decided that ten seconds of intimacy with the God of Mischief was worth more than keeping to your word, and not only that, now she’s gone, because they’re always gone. Everyone leaves. It’s what they do._

Eve made a noise in her throat. “Then she changes a great deal. I like that. Change is good.” She pushed the leaves of some palm tree up and over them.

“Loki would say she changes a lot. In the end, she changes so much she ends up the same, and will always be the same. I should’ve listened to her brother. How could I have seriously believed that I was going to be any different? My damn ego, that’s how. Sure, Stephen Strange can convince a god to change more than that god’s own brother. I got played and you’d think I’d thank her for the pleasure with how hard she reeled me in, hook, line and—”

There was a shimmer of something just beyond the biosphere’s windows, towards the center. Stephen caught it only for that his head drifted up to the sky for his ranting. The Cloak of Levitation rippled.

“And?” Eve seemed nonplussed. “Is that all to the story? Maybe you should be quiet. We’re close to the others now. It may be hard to distract Four if you can speak.”

Outline of a Quinjet. Stephen’s been to enough rodeos to know it anywhere.

 _Vishanti._ So much for not tearing the lid off of this operation at the worst possible time.

“Eve?” _Think, Stephen, think. They can see your astral form clear as day. Floating through the ceiling to tell them to hold their horses would blow your cover. They’re not going to barge in when they don’t know what I don’t know, would they? They can’t be that reckless. I’m not even sure what “Four” looks like, let alone how powerful she is, or what she wants…_ “Could we stop for a moment?”

Eve sat down on what looked to be some sort of synthetic hammock attached between a twin of trees. “Yes. Why? Do you not want to rescue your Wong?”

“No, no, it’s just—I need a moment to figure something out. There’s more variables at play.” So SHIELD’s tracked him down in record fashion, probably with Zelma’s help, because he’s disappointed her as much as anyone over the last two years. And Hill’s pissed, because if she wasn’t they’d still be tied up getting a clear to enter the Pacific what with Namor pulling a Namor and declaring war on any and all land-dwellers in his waters. Great. Wonderful. Just the kind of delicate situation endemic to a Sorcerer Supreme’s notorious surgical precision, isn’t it? Jesus, the things he’d do to have his spells back and at full capacity. Horrible, terrible things. Kicking a puppy. Pushing a grandmother down on the street. Letting Karl win a wizard duel. Stephen was at his wit’s end.

Time. He needed time. He always needed more tim—

“You’ve brought the sorcerer to Paradise, One?”

Never, ever enough of it.

“He is called Stephen Strange, Four,” said Eve. Stephen slowly craned his head back down, jaw clenched so tight that he could bite off his own tongue. “I thought it would be nice to take him in. Like the other we have. The Wong.”

Four—seeing her now—and Stephen’s heart skipped three beats.

“The Wong is _bait,_ One. If we did not have him, they would not bring us their stones. Don’t you understand? He does not have the Stones, does he?”

“No. He told me the god took them. He is not on this planet anymore.”

Four was no monster, no glumly abomination. She was human-like in the same way Eve was human-like, and was similar to no-one Stephen knew. But his heart sank anyway, hairs of his beginning to stand on end, and this was why: you need not the face of a beast for your presence to be indistinguishable from one. Four’s very aura was something so warped that Stephen was astonished that his third eye didn’t cringe. Something was wrong here. Something very, very wrong.

“The god.” Four spat at the ground. “I knew the god would be trouble.” She was looking at Stephen now, with that pupil-less, soulless stare, and it took every fiber of his being not to expose her on instinct with the Eye of Agamotto were she a fiend.

“I saw their fondness for each other. The god will come, one way or the other. And I will get what I want. Then we will no longer have to hide ourselves here.”

Eve, who must have sensed nothing of Stephen’s trepidation or ignored it, simply twirled some more of her hair. “You never say what you want, Four. I don’t like it. You’re no better than any of us, you know. We’re the same. It’s your fault Three is so meek and Two doesn’t do anything.” Four’s gaze snapped to her. Her fingers kept twirling. “I think you’re greedy. You keep secrets so no-one knows anything and won’t say no to you.”

Silence.

Then—

_**Tink.** _

Stephen flinched, feeling the slightest tickle of blood in the back of his neck. A dart. He’d been hit with a dart? What in Oshtur’s name was going on?

“Greetings, Gandalf,” a tinny, digital voice echoed in his ear. “Apologies about the frank delivery of your comms system. Noticed that the situation between the two aliens seems to be a little, shall we say, tense. Least they’re speaking English, right? Shame if they were about to go at it and we’d not understand a word they’re saying.” Tony Stark. He’d been hit with a dart by Tony Stark. (As if today couldn’t get any more bizarre.)

“Anyway,” Stark was saying, and Four and Eve were still staring each other down, “I know you can’t respond to us right now, Doctor, so let me explain. We’re positioned at the edges of this… garden? Yeah, garden. Point Break and I toward the entrance, Cap’s making his way to the northern clip. We’re ready to go at any time. The signal’s going to be you making a circle with your left index finger in the air, okay? Damn, these readings off my suit are buckwild. These ladies are definitely more appreciable to look at than the Skrull.”

Though he once thought it impossible, Stephen wasn’t even annoyed with Stark’s usual in that instant. He was a familiar point of contention where he was otherwise walking around in a place he couldn’t truly fathom being talked to by beings who, according to themselves, had only come into existence some months before—now he had to make sure that somehow, somewhere, some way, they made it through this encounter alive.

(Maybe it was for the better that he couldn’t know how much of that would be wishful thinking.)

“I am greedy.” Four was but a finger away from Eve’s face. “Do you think I should not be? What we are made of is in such short supply here, One. I have turned to science to make this place and keep us alive. We are in a desert. I have made an oasis. Two and Three listen to me because they recognize what I have given us. Do you think I enjoy it? Hiding? Waiting? Biding our time for a salvation that will never come if I do not make it?”

Eve did not pull away. “Their stones won’t give us that, Four. We should be working with the humans. I’ve decided this for myself. You’re going to kill us to make yourself stronger.”

Four, against everything, smiled and laughed, laughed, _laughed._ It was no human’s laugh, but the guttural guffaw of another already too wicked to be pulled back from the brink. Stephen knew that kind of laugh. He’d heard it countless times as the Sorcerer Supreme, never his own, but rather—

It was Dormmamu’s.

_Son of a **bitch.**_

Couldn’t have been anyone else, now, could it?

Four turned to Stephen. “Ah.” Her voice took on a dark and sardonic edge. “He knows it now. You’ve been lying to me, One. That’s too bad. What am I to do with a liar in my garden? My sweet, perfect garden? My Paradise?”

“Uh.” Tony was in his ear. “What is she talking about, Stephen?”

“Everyone.” Stephen said. “I suggest you stay back.”

The burst of light from the Eye of Agamotto stunned Four—her hisses echoed through the rest of the biosphere—but didn’t deter her as she levitated from the ground to meet Stephen, his fingers creating a Shield of Seraphim around them in the hope that it’d be enough to curtail friendly fire for what came next.

“The tiny sorcerer has finally figured it out, I see,” rumbled the dark voice. “But you’re too late! This creature belongs to me. And her and her ilk are immune to your paltry little spells and your paltry little incantations. Seems the Empirikul all but giftwrapped this one for old **DORMMAMU** , didn’t they? Had I known it’d only take wiping magic clean from the face of your planet to summon these perfect peons for me, I would’ve done it **YEARS** ago, “ _Sorcerer Supreme_ ”! And now when that god of yours comes back to find you, I’ll have the Stones, and then you won’t have a **DIMENSION** to return to! Allow me to give you a demonstration.”

‘Four’ snapped a finger, and Stephen’s world went white with agony.

Every personal ward—shattered. Every ritual of protection—shattered. Even the Ankh Eternal that kept him ageless was useless against the seeming storm of horrible force that descended on him and ran him ragged to the bones. It was a pain that was not matched then and still would not be matched now. It felt as though his very soul was being ripped in two and then the remains shredded into thousands of ribbons before his own eyes.

He was— He was— He was—

The Shields collapsed and on the ground, frozen in a face of twisted terror, a Sorcerer Supreme lied dying.

“Do you know how long I’ve waited for this? To finally see it that you die at the hands of Dormmamu? And after you’re through, take this diseased dimension down with you? And I didn’t even need that petulant child who calls himself your nemesis! I will make sure your body never gets so much as a GRAVE, Stephen Strange! Just the vast darkness of the VOID—”

Of anything to interject the monologue of a dread lord from the Dark Dimension, it was a cough.

“Speaking from a place of experience concerning the Void,” said Loki, “I must tell you, it isn’t the end all be all. Certainly less so for a man like Stephen. You’d have to choose much, much worse than that for it to constitute postmortem torture.”

A wily grin. “Oh, yes. This is the part where I save the day.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's evil of me to pause on a note like this, but my editing journey begins now. And this is the first year I've actually won Nanowrimo! I'm going to work on some other projects between editing, but don't worry, I am in *way* too deep into this story to leave it unfinished for too long.


End file.
